We haven't delved into the subject of different musical notation too heavily, but we did briefly discuss the evolution of it! The Greeks had their own notational system, which they often inscribed on gravestones, in the 10'th century little squiggles were drawn above the words of a song to indicate the general shape of the tune, and later more and more lines were drawn to clarify the sound of the notes, which turned into the staff we use today. From a few of the cultures we've covered so far, it seems as though a many of their traditions and musical styles were passed down orally, as well. Theory can be difficult, but it is very useful, like you said! A jazz class sounds like fun. Did it cover more of the history of jazz, or was it more of like an application/performance based class? Yes and yes, I am singing in choir and it is my first time in this setting. I was online-schooled all of high school, so I didn't really have an opportunity to do anything like it. I wish I could have, though, as it is a lot of fun.  

Oh wow haha. I guess that is one of the downsides of being a pianist (not being able to have multiple pianists in an instrument-based ensemble, I mean), along with not being able to take your instrument everywhere you perform. Yeah, we do have a recital series, where several musicians perform every month. I haven't been able to attend any yet, as I actually live a bit of a ways off campus and they've conflicted with my schedule, but I hope to!

I guess that is true, and good luck on the violin front! My sister is learning the violin, and I know it's not as easy as it might seem to an onlooker. And cool! Playing the piano really can be a lot of fun. What's one of your favorite pieces/musical time periods you've played? 

Fascinating stuff, thank you! I'm very interested in hearing what you chose to do for the toga problem, because I could see all three options being perfectly valid depending on the goals and target audience of your translations.

To me, every translation begins with several goals that focus the translation, and the target audience plays a big role in determining these goals. To me, someone who knows next to nothing about Latin or 1st century BCE Rome, "a woman wearing a toga" conveys no information. If your target audience was comprised mostly of casual readers like myself, describing this woman as dressed in rags or otherwise conveying a caustic tone sound like great solutions to conveying the author's intent. But at the same time, it obfuscates the author's wordchoice, which would be more inappropriate for an audience of people seeking to study the work seriously. However, someone seeking to seriously study Latin and ancient Rome will probably already be well-informed enough to understand the implication of a woman in a toga. So, in that case, a more direct translation or a footnote may be appropriate.

Since my audience is mostly comprised of casual readers, I don't tend to give the author's exact word choice quite as much weight as the ideas the author submits and the ways in which the author conveys their ideas. For instance, the important idea Sulpicia is conveying is that she thinks this woman is beneath her in status, not necessarily that this woman happens to be wearing a toga. Generally speaking, I prioritize the former over that latter, unless something about the method (perhaps clothing is a recurring motif? etc.) strikes me as important to convey too. I find that the media I work on doesn't have quite as many interesting literary devices as the sort of media you work with, though. This isn't to say that pop culture media is poorly written (although... that's certainly the case at times...), but I think everyone can agree that an episode of Naruto and Paradise Lost have different literary and cultural value, so to approach translating them in the same way would be inappropriate. (Although more experimental translations are incredibly fun and fascinating!)

I try to analyze everything I work on and determine what the author considers most important for the audience. In some works, that's the character work, so I take particular care to give everyone distinct character voices. Across the various series I work on, I have close to 60 characters I regularly write, each with their distinct set of rules. For other works, the narration style and world feel may be most important, so I prioritize that. For example, the two book series I'm presently working on have vastly different narrators, so a passage from one might look like this (I'm making this up off the top of my head based on how the book tends to be written):

Amelia gasped in delight as Charles opened the door. It was a charming cottage he'd brought her to, with doilies across the chairbacks and fresh flowers in vases scattered here and there across the various tables and bookshelves.
For a moment, she was so moved she could not bring herself to speak. "Oh, Charles," she finally managed, "it's gorgeous. I simply couldn't be happier with it."
Charles grinned. "I'll have the porter bring your trunk in shortly, my lady."

Whereas, an hour later, I'll go work on a book that looks like this:

Ohhhh. My. Goooooood.
Because finals threw our schedule for a loop, we had math on Thursday for what felt like thirty bajillion hours. I swear, if the bell didn't ring in the very next second, I legit was about to die of boredom.
I poked Kaori in the seat next to me. "Hey," I said. "If I wither away on the spot, strangled by the thorny vines of ennui, will you say something nice for me at my funeral?"
She gave me a Look. "Har-dee-har," she said. "But last I checked, Emiko, no one has ever died from too much algebra."
"Hey, you never know. I could be the first."

In both cases, the source text produces a very distinct narration style that I want to convey. But, as is the case for ludo and play, dictionary-level translations usually don't communicate this tone. This is because the Japanese author has special considerations to make for the Japanese audience which don't apply for the English audience and vice versa. For instance, Japanese uses grammatical structures called particles which, among other things, can denote the gender of the speaker. Amelia might end her sentences in the "wa" particle to indicate that she's a girl, but I don't have to worry about that at all. Instead, I might make her sound feminine in other ways--a male character probably wouldn't say, "Oh Charles, it's gorgeous." On the reverse side, the Japanese author doesn't need to worry about differences in British and American English because, well, they aren't writing in English. But this might be something for me to consider. If the story takes place in a Western-style fantasy world, which would therefore make a Japanese reader feel like it's happening with a slight disonnect, I might adopt elements of British English, such as "trunk," to give it a similar feel to American readers.

In Kaori and Emiko's case, though, the Japanese text is written the way Japanese teenagers talk...albeit a bit exagerrated. So, I likewise have Kaori and Emiko talk like (again, somewhat exaggerated) teenagers. Also, let's say the author used the term "jito me," a slang term for glaring in reproach or disgust, to describe the way Kaori looked at Emiko. We don't have a slang word that means exactly that, so I want to consider instead what the purpose of this word is. It essentially does two things: makes that line amusing, and indicates Emiko's slangy, youthful speech style. What I can do instead is capitalize "look" (something that wouldn't be possible in Japanese, as there is no distinction between capital and lowercase) for the humor and actually move the idea of slang to elsewhere in the text, like with the use of the word "legit." If an idea's position isn't signifigant, I have free reign to move it elsewhere where it might suit my purposes better.

This is a great tool to have in other ways, particularly because the rules of storytelling and good writing in Japanese and English differ by a lot. Many scenes in Japanese stories will open on a character saying something interesting to hook the reader, backtrack to give context, and then pick up from where the opening line left off. English, however, is mostly chronological, so moving that opening line or otherwise being a little creative with it might be helpful. Some scenes will also open with a brief explanation of setting, like "It's Thursday" or "It's after lunch." In the case of Kaori and Emiko, I moved that information about it being Thursday into the second paragraph because that would flow better in English.

Sometimes, you can even add things wholesale if they're English conventions! (Or likewise, drop things if they're Japanese conventions and not indicative of the author's personal choice. For instance, Japanese people will literally say, "I'm being rude," when walking into a room, but that's purely a social convention, like saying "Gesundheit" after a sneeze. I might write this as "Excuse me" in a formal setting or simply drop it or write "Hi" if it's in a casual setting.) Japanese doesn't use dialogue tags with anywhere near the frequency of English, so I added dialogue tags in those sample paragraphs. Japanese also uses ellipses differently than English does. In the Amelia and Charles passage, Amelia might have said "...It's gorgeous" in the source text, but this pause might make her sound like she's upset when written in English. Since I know that the author wrote that to show that she's awestruck, I chose to drop the ellipsis and write in a line expressing that idea instead. This is also usually what I do with lyrics and poems, because Japanese finds poetic beauty in different things than rhyme and meter. (I loved your explanation of Latin meter considerations!) When a poem appeared in the Amelia and Charles series, it followed Japanese poetry conventions. In order for it to fit in the Western fantasy worldview, where people expect to see rhyming poems, I translated it as a series of four couplets.

And to answer your last question about alliteration and rhyme--again, rhyme and alliteration aren't commonly used in Japanese outside of a few very specific exceptions. (One of these is in rap/hip-hop, which I work with frequently. There, I try to match the same level of rhyme and wordplay but won't care too much about the exact location of each because it'd be impossible to write otherwise. I move ideas and literary devices around constantly in lyrics.) But when I see the author practicing something that I recognize as a good Japanese literary device, I try to incoporate that with good English wriitng of my own. I always want to try to present the author's work in the most positive light that I can, so that means as much good English writing as is possible.

Apologies for this wall of text, but I hope that gives you a good picture of some of the similarities and differences in our translation fields and language pairs. I'd really love to hear more about how you approach your poetry and meter, if you don't mind sharing.