Taiwan Travelogue translator Lin King is calling out publishing’s “relay translation” practices.

Lin King is a translator and writer who translated the Mandarin-language novel Taiwan Travelogue (《臺灣漫遊錄》), originally written by Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ, into English.

The English translation won the Booker Prize.

The original book was published in Mandarin under the title Táiwān Màn Yóu Lù.

King discovered that a European publisher planned to release a new translation of the book, but this time translated from her English version into a third language.

This practice is called relay translation, where a text is translated into a new language not from the original source, but from an existing translation.

King argues that this violates her copyright as the sole owner of the English translation.