trouble with self association

Situation: I need to list many books, some of which are translations
of others in the database. I'd like to note whether a book is a
translation of another or if it has one or more translations (and link
to it/them). Thus, my Book model:

public $hasMany = array(
'Review',
'Translation' => array(
'className' => 'Book',
'foreignKey' => 'translation_source_id'
)
);
public $belongsTo = array(
'Publisher',
'TranslationSource' => array(
'className' => 'Book',
'foreignKey' => 'translation_source_id'
)
);

I didn't use translation_id because a Book can have many Translations.
This way, I can keep everything within the same table. To view a
particular Book, I'm using the following:

return $this->find(
'first',
array(
'conditions' => $conditions,
'fields' => array('Book.*'),
'contain' => array(
'Publisher',
'Translation' => array(
'fields' => array(
'Translation.id',
'Translation.translation_source_id',
'Translation.title',
'Translation.slug',
'Translation.translator',
'Translation.translation_language'
)
),
'TranslationSource' => array(
'fields' => array(
'TranslationSource.id',
'TranslationSource.title',
'TranslationSource.slug'
)
),
'Review' => array(
'order' => array('Review.sort_order' => 'ASC')
),
'Image' => array('Thumbnail')
)
)
);

For a Book that is a Translation, the data includes:

[TranslationSource] => Array
(
[id] => {the id}
[title] => {the title}
[slug] => {the slug}
)

... and Translation is empty (because the original should not be
considered a translation of a translation). So far, so good. Now, for
a Book that has one or more Translations, the Translation array
correctly includes the details for each of those. However, I also get:

[TranslationSource] => Array
(
[id] =>
[title] =>
[slug] =>
[TranslationSource] => Array
(
)
)

So, my code can't simply check if $data['TranslationSource'] is empty
to decide how to proceed. And what's with the nested
TranslationSource? I figure this has to be something to do with how
I've created the associations but can't figure out where I've gone
wrong.

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