Jurisdiction: California, USA.
If a book was written in Greek two thousand years ago, and someone translated it into English more recently (say, yesterday), and then someone else wants to translate that English translation into French, would that be a violation of copyright law?
This resource suggests to me that it may be: https://www.translatorsbase.com/articles/42.aspx
However I haven't found really clear legal information about such re-translation.
While the original Greek is public domain, the English translation is a new literary work with its own copyright running for 70 years after the author(s) death(s). The French translation of the English work would require the permission of the author(s). A French translation of the original Greek wouldn't.
This assumes that the translation was not simply mechanical; like running it through Google translate. A purely mechanical translation lacks the originality required to create a literary work - an English translation obtained algorithmically is a copy; just like a zip file is a copy.
