alt Hacker News> Copy pasting from one language to another is way worse than complete rewrite with actual idiomatic and useful code.
But translating with automated tools is a much faster experiment.
Sometimes (not always), rewriting from scratch ends up in a big loss of time and resources and never replaces the old version.
I've seen more than a few rewrite attempts fail throughout the years. However, I've never seen a direct language to language translation fail. I've done several of these personally: from perl to ruby, java to kotlin, etc.
Step 1 of any rewrite of a non-trivial codebase should should be parity. You can always refactor to make things more idiomatic in a later phase.