using rel=canonical on a translated page (to pass link juice to the original in other language)

Hi, Warriors!

This is my very first post.

I came with an idea for link building.

I have a page that I want to rank for a spanish language keyword.

But, since the link building culture is not so developed among latam webmasters and bloggers, I will try to do link building over the english-speaking Internet community.

I came up with the idea of building an asset in spanish. But an asset in spanish won't be relevant to english-speaking users, so bloggers and webmasters won't link to me. So I'm planning to re-create the same asset but in english (as a second page).

I thought that including rel=canonical in the header of the asset in english can pass link juice to the original asset in spanish (which is pointing to the keyword in spanish I want to rank for).

This way, I can build links with english-speaking bloggers and webmasters to the english asset, and it will pass link juice to the spanish asset.

Buuuuuut...

I read that Google sometimes disregard the rel=canonical if the webpage that is using it is not exactly equal to the page that the tag points to.

Maybe I will have to find out this by myself, but since I'm doing this for another person, I don't want to waste time on something that won't work.

My other option is to include a very big a button on the spanish asset that says "read this in english". But this way I think the success rate will be very very low.

So, the questions are:

Did anybody try this in the past?

Do you think it will work?

Do you think it will be enough with the button to translate the asset to "english"?


Maybe I'm asking a lot, but it can't hurt to ask.

Thanks in advance warriors!

Cheers!

Paco.