Imagine a high-stakes diplomatic summit. On one side of the table sits a representative from Estonia; on the other, a diplomat from Vietnam. They need to discuss intricate trade agreements involving specific agricultural terminology and legal nuances. The problem? There is no interpreter in the building—perhaps no professional interpreter in the immediate vicinity—who is qualified to translate directly between Estonian and Vietnamese.

The solution is not to call off the meeting, but to bring in a third party: the “pivot.”

This is the fascinating, high-wire act known as Relay Translation (or indirect translation). It is the linguistics world’s version of the telephone game, played not for laughs, but for the fate of international relations, global literature, and access to information. While it connects cultures that effectively “don’t touch”, it also opens the door to a unique set of linguistic distortions that can alter the message entirely.

The Mechanics of the “Pivot” Language

In standard translation, we move from the Source Language (A) directly to the Target Language (B). Relay translation complicates the formula. It inserts a Bridge Language (or Pivot Language) into the equation.

The process looks like this: Language A → Pivot Language → Language B.

In our initial example, the Estonian delegate would speak. An interpreter would translate the Estonian into English (the pivot). A second interpreter would then listen to the English output and translate that into Vietnamese. The Vietnamese diplomat receives the message exclusively through the filter of the English translation.

While English is the most common pivot language globally—often referred to as a “hypercentral” language in linguistics—French, Spanish, and Russian frequently serve as pivots in specific geographic regions.

Why Do We Need Relay Translation?

If direct translation is the gold standard, why settle for relay? Simply put: mathematics and scarcity.

• The Combinatorial explosion: Consider the European Union. With 24 official languages, there are 552 possible language combinations ($24 \times 23$). Maintaining a staff of interpreters capable of covering every single pair (e.g., Maltese to Finnish or Slovak to Portuguese) is logistically impossible.
• Resource Scarcity: For “languages of lesser diffusion” (LLDs), there may simply be no qualified professionals available. Finding someone fluent in classic Maya and Japanese is a tall order; finding someone who speaks both plus a common bridge like Spanish is much easier.
• Cost Efficiency: Multilingual conferences cannot hire endless distinct pairs. Using a pivot system allows a central team (usually interpreting into English/French) to feed information to all other language booths.

The “Telephone” Effect: Where Nuance Goes to Die

Anyone who played “Telephone” (or “Chinese Whispers”) in kindergarten knows the risks of passing a message through a chain. In professional translation, the intent is accuracy, but the introduction of a middleman inevitably degrades the signal.

The primary danger in relay translation represents a compounding of errors. In translation theory, there is a concept that every translation involves some degree of loss—a shedding of nuance, tone, or cultural context. When you translate via a relay, you double that loss.

The Polysemy Trap

Languages rarely map onto one another perfectly 1:1. Words are often polysemous, meaning they have multiple meanings.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Suppose a speaker in Language A uses a word that implies both “cheap” (inexpensive) and “nasty” (low quality). The Pivot Interpreter (Language A → English) has to make a split-second choice. They choose “inexpensive” because of time constraints, dropping the negative connotation of “nasty.”

The second interpreter (English → Language B) hears “inexpensive.” They translate it into a word in Language B that means “affordable” or “good value.”

The message has now shifted from an insult (cheap and nasty) to a compliment (good value). The original speaker’s sarcasm has been completely sanitized, not because of incompetence, but because the Pivot language acted as a filter that stripped away the double-meaning.

Relay in the Real World: Literature and Diplomacy

The consequences of relay translation vary from distinct changes in literary voice to international confusion.

The “Anglicized” Worldview

Because English is the dominant pivot language, the world is increasingly filtered through an Anglo-centric lens. When a novel is translated from Japanese to Portuguese, if it is done via the English translation (which happens frequently in commercial publishing to save money), the Portuguese readers are not reading the Japanese thoughts directly. They are reading the English interpretation of those thoughts.

Cultural concepts that exist in Japan and Portugal but not in England might be lost. If Japanese has a formal distinction that exists in Portuguese but not in English, the English pivot will flatten that distinction. When the Portuguese translator receives the text, the formality marker is gone, and they cannot put it back. The bridge language effectively acts as a bottleneck for cultural complexity.

Diplomatic Incidents

In international courts and the United Nations, relay translation is heavily regulated, yet errors persist. A famous structural strain occurred during the trial of terrorist suspects in the wake of 9/11. Courts struggled to find interpreters for specific dialects of Pashto or Arabic who could translate directly into English.

Often, the court had to rely on “relay” chains involving family members or community leaders translating a dialect into standard Arabic, and then a professional translating that into English. Legal scholars noted that specific legal rights and technical definitions were “smoothed over” by the pivot, potentially endangering the fairness of the trials.

The Future: Machine Translation and Zero-Shot Learning

In the digital age, we rely on relay translation more than we realize. excellent examples are found in early versions of Google Translate. For years, if you asked an engine to translate from Hindi to Zulu, it didn’t have a direct “Hindi-Zulu” dictionary. Instead, it translated Hindi to English, and then English to Zulu.

This resulted in hilarious and bizarre errors, often cited in “Translation Fails” videos. A gender-neutral pronoun in the source might be assigned a gender by the English pivot, which is then carried over incorrectly to the target.

However, computational linguistics is moving toward Zero-Shot Translation. This is an AI model design where a system learns to translate between two languages (like Korean and Thai) without ever having seen a direct pairing of them and without using English as an explicit bridge step. It analyzes the underlying mathematical “space” of the languages to create a direct connection.

The Human Connector

Despite the risks of errors and the dilution of nuance, relay translation remains a testament to human ingenuity. It is a refusal to let a lack of direct connection stop communication. It reminds us that while languages may define our borders, our desire to understand one another constantly builds bridges—even if we have to cross them two at a time.

For language learners, the lesson of relay translation is clear: the closer you can get to the source, the truer the story becomes. Relying on a translation of a translation is like looking at a photocopy of a photograph; the image is there, but the depth is gone. Whenever possible, learn the source. Eliminate the pivot.