Can you take the ideas (not the expressions) of characters or creatures for instance, from public domain even if you are having to research them using English translations? Do copyright laws prevent the person from using the ideas of the information about said topic given that the article is a translation rather than the original which is from the public domain?
2 Answers
If you used characters or premises from a novel that has copyright protections then your publisher can be sued for infringement. It doesn’t matter of the original version is in the public domain if you are going to write in a language that the original work has been translated into and hte copyright is still in effect.
To make is worse, if you published your novel in a language that the original had never been translated into, then if someone translated that work into that language, you’d still be infringing since the new translation would have a copyright in the new language.
Once a work is in the public domain, you can do with it and the ideas expressed in it whatever you like.
A translation has its own copyright, but that covers only the words of the translation, not the story, characters, ideas etc. expressed through those words. That is, you can still freely use the content of the original story. It does not matter if you learned of it by reading the original or a translation.
What you cannot do is use the words of the translation (e.g. as dialogue in a movie made from the story). But an existing translation does not prohibit the creation of another translation. (You can look at how many different English translations exist of Homer's Odyssee, for example.)
