When are translations transitive ?

At Tatoeba.org I find the assertion that if sentence A in language 'a' is translated into sentence B in language 'b' and then someone has translated B into sentence C in language 'c' that there is thereby a network of translation links which includes A - C.

This, is of course, the curse of Google translate, where an error in Russian - English is perpetuated as an error in Russian - German, Russian - French etc. as all pass through English as their way-station.

One symptom may be that tatoeba.org relies on ISO 639-3 language codes in which Nihon-go is 'jpn' and Castillian Spanish is not 'esp' but 'spa'.  Notably deutsch and français escape as 'deu' and 'fra' rather than 'ger' and 'fre'.

Perhaps the parlour game of rumour is out of favour.

One simple Japanese sentence

イソップ 童話 に 『 すっぱい 葡萄 』 という 話が あり ます。

is translated into English as

In Aesop's Fables is a story called "Sour Grapes".

and not

In Aesop's Fables there is a story called "Sour Grapes".

or

There is a story called "Sour Grapes" in Aesop's Fables.

My own comment to the "owner" of the translation, follows:

There is a story called "The Fox and the Grapes" in Aesop's Fables.

The story name is in quotes: but what is standard English today for the book title?

Note that we are not using the characters now designated as English start and end quote and English apostrophe ... (yes, there is a UNICODE character for 3 dots as well.)