Cats are in charge , though . <| sep |> If we ' re talking about machine translation , then it depends on how the tool is designed , what underlying data it has access to and how it processes translations . To provide an example , a statistical translation machine which is how Google Translate worked in the past relies on huge corpora and more importantly , bilingual corpora . If the bilingual corpora between two languages doesn ' t exist or isn ' t large enough , such a tool might rely on an intermediary language to handle the translation . So if there were more translations between EnglishPortuguese and EnglishSpanish than there were directly between PortugueseSpanish , it wouldn ' t be unreasonable for the machine to process the translation as so PortugueseEnglishSpanish . In this type of scenario , you might lose some fine details . So it could depend , but realistically the more related two languages are , the more closely in contact they are , and the more likely that there are writings and translations between them , so it ' s unlikely to be a significant issue .