How do you translate a row of infinitive words in Esperanto?

Question

The most obvious answer would be to just make a row of infinitive Esperanto words, but I wonder if you can not introduce more explicit relations.

Here is an example from Consecutive infinitives on English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

The witness plans to refuse to testify.

That in a first approach could be translated as:

La spektanto[1] planas rifuzi atesti.

But this seems rather unusual to me as Esperanto construction, and I'm not sure it's even grammatically acceptable. So I would probably go with something like:

La spektanto planas refuzadon de atestado.

The above link give example with more infinitive verbs in a row, like The witness refuses to consider to agree to testify to help to free, so I wonder how I would translate such a sentence. Could I use a simple row of infinitive verbs in Esperanto too?

[1] aŭ atestanto sed tio ne gravas por la nuna demando.

Answer 1

You would just put many infinitives one after the other, as you suggested at first. This is grammatically correct and perfectly acceptable. Thus

La spektanto planas rifuzi atesti.

is completely fine. This is also what I would naturally say. In tekstaro there are plenty of examples of double infinitives (for some reason the link may not work, but search \b\LI{3,}i\b \b\LI{3,}i\b on tekstaro). Here is one with rifuzi in particular:

Li ne povas (…) rifuzi paroli, ĉar la publiko ne plaĉas al li.

—Retoriko

For your last sentence you would indeed just get a row of infinitives, but note that for to help you would actually add por, because it is a goal (a good indication of this is that you can replace ‘to help’ with ‘in order to help’):

La spektanto rifuzas konsideri konsenti atesti por helpi liberigi la akuziton.