Factory Girl self-join throwing validation errors

I'm trying to test a system for creating article translations where there is a self-join on the publications table. I've created a factory that will create multiple translations and associate them with a 'parent' article.

Using Rails 5 with factory_girl 4.7.0, rspec, and Database_cleaner

All actions work as expected, but creating a test is the problem

Here's the relevant model validations and methods:

  # models/publication.rb

  has_many :translations, class_name: "Publication", foreign_key: "translation_id", dependent: :nullify
  belongs_to :translation, class_name: "Publication", optional: true

  validates :language, uniqueness: { scope: :translation_id }, if: :is_translation?

  def is_translation?
    !translation.nil?
  end

Factory (irrelevant code omitted):

  # spec/factories/publication.rb
  factory :publication, aliases: [:published_pub] do
    title 'Default Title'
    language 'EN'
    published

    after(:build) do |object|
      create(:version, publication: object)
    end

    #-- This is where I suspect the problem stems from

    trait :with_translations do
      association :user, factory: :random_user

      after(:build) do |object|
        create_list(:translation, 3, {user: object.user, translation:object})
      end
    end
  end

  factory :translation, class: Publication do
    sequence(:title) { |n| ['French Article', 'Spanish Article', 'German Article', 'Chinese Article'][n]}
    sequence(:language) { |n| ['FR', 'ES', 'DE', 'CN'][n]}
    user
  end

And a basic test:

    # spec/models/publication_spec.rb
    before(:each) do
      @translation_parent = create(:publication, :with_translations)
      @pub_without_trans = create(:publication, :with_random_user)
    end

    scenario 'is_translation?' do
      # No actual test code needed, this passes regardless
    end

    scenario 'has_translations?' do
      # No actual test code needed, this (and subsequent tests) fail regardless
    end

Finally, the error:

 Failure/Error: create_list(:translation, 3, {user: object.user, translation:object})

 ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid:
   Validation failed: Language has already been taken

The first test passes (and the publication object with translations is created correctly)but any subsequent test fails. The issue is that I have a uniqueness validation scoped to translation_id and it appears that factorygirl is trying to add the generated translations to an already existing publication instead of creating an entirely new publication.

Any help is appreciated!