A Copyright Claim That Targets an Industry Habit
Lin King, the translator behind the Booker Prize-winning English edition of Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ, announced on Instagram Tuesday that she has initiated legal proceedings against an unnamed European publisher. The publisher, she says, was preparing to release a translation of the novel into a third language – not from the original Mandarin, Táiwān Màn Yóu Lù (《臺灣漫遊錄》), but directly from King’s English text, without her knowledge or consent.
The practice has a name in the industry: relay translation. A book moves from its source language into a widely spoken intermediary – English, usually – and a second translator then works from that version rather than the original. It cuts costs and removes the need for translators who work in rarer language pairs. It also, King argues, violates the copyright of the person who produced the intermediary text. After sending what she describes as “repeated warnings” to the publisher and receiving no satisfactory response, she says legal proceedings are now underway.
What King Actually Owns – and Why It Matters
“As I am the sole copyright owner of the English Taiwan Travelogue,” King writes in her statement, “an unauthorized third-language translation violates my copyright.” The claim rests on a principle that often gets lost in how publishers and readers think about translated books: the English text is not the Mandarin original with different words swapped in. It is a distinct creative work, produced entirely by King, and protected as such under copyright law.
King frames this through analogy in some of the statement’s most direct passages. She compares translation to Whitney Houston recording Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” – the two versions are different artistic objects, and whether one is “better” is a matter of opinion, but that they are different is, in her words, “indisputable.” She extends the logic further: the writer is a composer, the translator is the musician. The writer is a choreographer, the translator is the dancer. Every interpretive choice a translator makes shapes how the original work lands in a new language, and those choices belong to the translator.
“I chose, from the chaotic expanses of the English lexicon, every single word in Taiwan Travelogue,” King writes. She notes that Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ cannot read the English edition, just as King herself will not be able to read most translations of her own novel when it publishes next year. The translators of those editions will, in her framing, be writing those books – not the original author. It is a clean inversion of the usual hierarchy, and it makes her copyright argument harder to dismiss.
Yuka Igarashi, Executive Editor at Graywolf Press – which published Taiwan Travelogue in English – released a statement in support: “Lin King’s inspired translation of Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s brilliant novel demonstrates the point she is making – that translators are writers in their own right whose copyright must be respected.” Igarashi described translators as “artists, mediators, and advocates” who are “indispensable in the dissemination of literature internationally.”
The Money, or Rather the Lack of It
“This is not about the money,” King writes – a line that requires almost no additional context for anyone who knows what literary translators are typically paid. King volunteered her time without compensation to begin translating Táiwān Màn Yóu Lù and then pitched the book herself directly to American publishers. “Translation is a horrendous business plan,” she writes. “I do it because I believe in the books.”
That context reframes the legal action. King is not chasing a financial windfall. She is pursuing a case she believes could shift the legal status quo around relay translation – a practice that persists largely because it always has, and because translators rarely have the platform or resources to fight it.
The Precedent She’s Trying to Set
“Since when has ‘it’s always been done this way’ been a sufficient reason for continuing to infringe on people’s rights?” King asks in her statement. The lawsuit, if it proceeds, would be one of the more visible legal challenges to relay translation from a translator with the profile to sustain public attention on the issue. King is direct about the goal: she wants to establish new legal precedent, not just win a single dispute with one publisher.
Her closing appeal is addressed to publishers specifically. “To all publishers of translated fiction, I beseech you: Ask for permission, not forgiveness. If you love these books, respect the rights of the translators who rewrite these stories so that you, too, can read them.” The language is measured but the challenge is broad – she is asking an entire industry to examine how it sources translations and whether its standard contracts and workflows have quietly normalized what is, in her reading, outright infringement.
For now, the European publisher’s identity has not been disclosed. King’s full statement remains on her Instagram. The legal case has not yet reached any reported stage of formal resolution – which means the publishing industry’s relay translation habits are still under direct legal challenge, with no settlement or verdict to absorb the pressure and move on.
