Shouldn't this be the reverse (by deleting the "no")?

Question

I wonder about the translation of this passage from Tom Sawyer:

Each lad had an income, now, that was simply prodigious -- a dollar for every week-day in the year and half of the Sundays. It was just what the minister got -- no, it was what he was promised -- he generally couldn't collect it.

Cada uno de ellos tenía ahora una renta que era simplemente prodigiosa: un dólar por cada día de entre semana durante todo el año, y medio los domingos. Era precisamente lo mismo que el pastor ganaba...; es decir, no era precisamente lo que le habían prometido, aunque nunca conseguía recaudarlo.

Shouldn't this part:

es decir, no era precisamente lo que le habían prometido.

...instead be translated like so:

es decir, era precisamente lo que le habían prometido.

(without the "no"?)

Answer 1

There's a mistake in the Spanish translation, but it's not the one you think it is. In this part of the text it's as if the narrator were an actual speaker telling a tale. The narrator says something ("It was just what the minister got"), then realizes he was wrong, so he says "no" (he could have said "well" or "well, actually no", etc.) and then corrects himself: "it was what he was promised", and clarifies why these two things are not the same: "he generally couldn't collect it". The sentence works the same in a proper Spanish translation. The Spanish no is here the same as the English no when opposed to yes; it's not the equivalent of English not.

I would translate the relevant sentence like this:

Era precisamente lo mismo que el pastor ganaba... No, era lo que le habían prometido; generalmente no conseguía recaudarlo.

You could change the punctuation a bit, and you could also add aunque ("even though") and de hecho ("in fact") to make it flow better:

Era precisamente lo mismo que el pastor ganaba... No, de hecho era lo que le habían prometido, aunque generalmente no conseguía recaudarlo.