Japanese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Japanese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The speaker has just decided what route to drive:
「よし、次の交差点を渡ったら、右折して路地の方を回っていきましょう」
Right! When I cross the next junction I'll turn right and ???
I don't understand the part in bold. Literally, I have something like:
I will keep turning through the direction of the lane. or,
I will turn through the direction of the lane and go.
I can't understand what 'turn through a direction' 方を回る means. I'm also not sure what the function of いく is here. Hence my two alternatives.
I don't feel the previous answers are correct. 回っていきましょう is used to generally refer to an act of deliberately avoiding the shortest path, usually to arrive faster etc (e.g. there is a traffic jam on the shortest path so you go through the ally). It doesn't refer to any actual, physical change in bearing. For example in the sentence you've given, you arrive immediately into the 路地 by doing 右折. You don't make any additional turns.
You can see this in expressions like 急がば回れ. It just generally refers to the act of "going around" rather than literary turning to any direction.
So I would translate it as:
Right, once we cross the next junction, let's turn right and go through the alley (rather than the main road)
To complement the other answer, according to this online japanese thesaurus, 回っていく can also have a meaning similar to "to advance smoothly" and "things progressing as well as/the way it was intended", which is a bit less literal than in that context.
You've got the translation down almost.
I'd go with
OK, once you've crossed at the next intersection, turn right and head in the direction of the alley.
方を回っていく means to "go off in the direction of..."
