Spanish via English? When Relay Translation Works, and When It Doesn't

Relay translation means translating the book not from the original but from an existing translation, for example from the English version into Spanish. It works when the first translation is very good and finished, and when there's no direct translator available for the language you want. It works less well for a book whose voice is built on wordplay, poetry or dialect, because every compromise in the first translation gets passed along.

What relay translation is

Say you wrote a novel in Hebrew and it's already out in English. Now someone from Spain gets in touch. There are two ways: translate from the Hebrew into Spanish, or translate from the English into Spanish.

The second way is called indirect translation, or relay translation. Wikipedia defines it simply: a translation of a translation.

This isn't a new invention. José Saramago, for example, translated "Anna Karenina" into Portuguese in 1959 from the French translation, not from the Russian. For hundreds of years books traveled between languages through whatever big language was available in that place.

Why people do it

Because sometimes it's the only practical option.

• There aren't enough direct translators. There are many translators from Hebrew into English. From Hebrew into Portuguese, Dutch or Japanese, far fewer. And from English into any language there's a whole market.
• The English translation already exists. If you have an edited English version, it's ready raw material.
• Editors abroad have already read the English. If a foreign publisher decided to buy the book after reading it in English, they may prefer the translation to stay close to what they read.

What gets lost along the way

The problem is simple: every translation is a series of decisions, and the second translator receives the first one's decisions without knowing they're decisions.

An example. Your book has a character named Shaked, which in Hebrew is also the word for almond, the tree, and in one chapter there's a joke about it. The English translator decided to keep the name Shaked and give up the joke. The Spanish translator, who reads only the English, doesn't even know there was a joke. And maybe in Spanish it could actually have been saved.

More examples of what gets passed along:

• Names. How the name was written in Latin letters. The form chosen for English will reach every language after it. We wrote about this in why names change in translated books.
• Cultural references. If the English translator explained something, or swapped it for an American equivalent, the second translator gets the American equivalent. A Spanish reader who reads about an Israeli custom that was swapped for an American one gets a book that doesn't belong anywhere.
• Mistakes. A sentence that was misunderstood in English will be translated wrong in Spanish too, this time with full confidence.

According to the same Wikipedia article, UNESCO recommended back in 1976 to use indirect translation only when there's no other choice. It's a cautious guideline, but it understands the problem.

When it does make sense

Not every book suffers to the same degree. Relay translation suits a book better when:

• The book relies on content, not language. Nonfiction, a professional guide, a memoir in a direct style. What matters in it is what happened and what was explained, not how the sentence sounds.
• The first translation is really good. Edited, checked, and you or someone you trust read it and approved it.
• There's no good direct translator. A good translation through English is better than a weak translation straight from Hebrew.

And it suits poetry less, or rhyming children's books, or a novel whose voice is built on slang or on the Hebrew of a particular era. In books like that, every extra layer takes the reader further from the original. We explained how to recognize a book like that in is my book hard to translate.

If you chose relay translation, what to do

1. Finish the first translation first. Don't start the Spanish while the English is still being edited. Otherwise you have two books changing at the same time.
2. Give the second translator the original too. Even if they don't read Hebrew, they can get help from tools or from a person who does, when something in the English looks odd.
3. Pass on a list of names and terms. How each name is spelled, and what each special term means in the original.
4. Mark the places where the English moved away on purpose. A joke that was replaced, a poem that was rewritten, a custom that was explained. Three lines of explanation can save a whole chapter of compromises.

We wrote more about how to get the tone of the book across to a translator in how to tell a translator how your book should sound.

And what about machine translation

Computer tools can also translate directly from Hebrew into Spanish, without going through English. If you're using a service like that, ask what it actually does: translate from the original, or pass through English along the way. But the basic question stays: even when a computer translates from a translation, it inherits the decisions of the first translation. If you have the option to translate from the original, it's usually better.