>>11108586This used to happen all the time.
For example, when I wanted to read Mediations by Marcus Aurelius, I didn't care enough to buy it, so I just found an open access version online. This happened to be a translation by some British guy from the 1800s.
Back then they had some stupid ideas about translations. Nowadays you always want to convey the actual sense of the thing, write it in the new language so that it reads natural and within reason conveys the same feelings and meaning.
But back then they were obsessed with accuracy at the expense of readability or understanding, and the worst way this manifested was that they would mangle English grammar to make it more like the grammar of the original text, even though the result doesn't scan at all in English. In Latin you can have very long sentences and they read pretty fluidly and naturally, but that doesn't work in English. So in meditations you'd get the victorian guy turning out like English sentences that went on for half a page cause it was also one sentence in Latin, the result being a disaster.
I imagine Oppenheimer was a nerd who got one of these dumb old timey translations of a Hindu text, and directly copied the mangled translation thinking that was more faithful when really that's not how translation should work.
This is the translation of meditations if you want to get a sense of what I mean. Starts out ok but the problems become more apparent as it goes along:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2680/2680-h/2680-h.htm 
