Burns has passed kind of into folk status, and is a special case.
What matters, obviously, is not whether Burns has passed into folk status, but whether the particular translation has. The latter seems an implausible claim (since printed translations can presumably be traced and attributed), but if it were true, then there would be no need for acknowledgement (almost by definition of "folk status").
My comment arose from the suspicion that you reacted as if Burns had been paraphrased, as opposed to translated -- because the original language looks similar enough to English that a translation will tend to look like a paraphrase. I find it unlikely that you would actually have made this comment if lukeprog had quoted Catallus without mentioning the translator; and on the other hand I suspect you would have commented if he had taken the liberty of paraphrasing (or "translating") a passage from Shakespeare into contemporary English without acknowledging he had done so. My point being that the case of Burns should be treated like the former scenario, rather than the latter, whereas I suspect you intuitively perceived the opposite.
All translation is paraphrase, of course -- but there is a difference of connotation that corresponds to a difference in etiquette. When one is dealing with an author writing in the same language as oneself, there is a certain obligation to the original words that does not (cannot) exist in the case of an author writing in a different language. So basically, I saw your comment as not-acknowledging that Burns was writing in a different language.
I would never quote Catullus or Baudelaire in English as if it were the original author's words. No. It's wrong (deprives the translator of rightful credit) -- and, FWIW, it's also low-status.
I don't see it as lowering the status of the quoter; the status dynamic that I perceive is that it grants very high status to the original author, status so high that we're willing to overlook the original author's handicap of speaking a different language. In effect, it grants them honorary in-group status.
For example: Descartes has high enough status that the content of his saying "I think therefore I am" is more important to us than the fact that his actual words would have sounded like gibberish (unless we know French); people who speak gibberish normally have low status. Or, as Arnold Schoenberg once remarked (probably in German), "What the Chinese philosopher says is more important than that he speaks Chinese". Only high-status people like philosophers get this kind of treatment!
Only high-status people like philosophers get this kind of treatment!
Are you saying that always when a sentence is translated, its author must have high status or gains high status at the moment of translation, because the default attitude is to ignore anything originally uttered in foreign language?
If this is what you mean, I find it surprising. I have probably never been in a situation when someone was ignored because he spoke incomprehensible gibberish and that fact was more important than the content of his words. Of course, translation may be costl...
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
- Robert Burns (translated)
Consider the following question:
Or, suppose Holden Karnofsky of charity-evaluator GiveWell has been presented with a complex analysis of why an intervention that reduces existential risks from artificial intelligence has astronomical expected value and is therefore the type of intervention that should receive marginal philanthropic dollars. Holden feels skeptical about this 'explicit estimated expected value' approach; is his skepticism justified?
Suppose you're a business executive considering n alternatives whose 'true' expected values are μ1, ..., μn. By 'true' expected value I mean the expected value you would calculate if you could devote unlimited time, money, and computational resources to making the expected value calculation.2 But you only have three months and $50,000 with which to produce the estimate, and this limited study produces estimated expected values for the alternatives V1, ..., Vn.
Of course, you choose the alternative i* that has the highest estimated expected value Vi*. You implement the chosen alternative, and get the realized value xi*.
Let's call the difference xi* - Vi* the 'postdecision surprise'.3 A positive surprise means your option brought about more value than your analysis predicted; a negative surprise means you were disappointed.
Assume, too kindly, that your estimates are unbiased. And suppose you use this decision procedure many times, for many different decisions, and your estimates are unbiased. It seems reasonable to expect that on average you will receive the estimated expected value of each decision you make in this way. Sometimes you'll be positively surprised, sometimes negatively surprised, but on average you should get the estimated expected value for each decision.
Alas, this is not so; your outcome will usually be worse than what you predicted, even if your estimate was unbiased!
Why?
This is "the optimizer's curse." See Smith & Winkler (2006) for the proof.
The Solution
The solution to the optimizer's curse is rather straightforward.
To return to our original question: Yes, some skepticism is justified when considering the option before you with the highest expected value. To minimize your prediction error, treat the results of your decision analysis as uncertain and use Bayes' Theorem to combine its results with an appropriate prior.
Notes
1 Smith & Winkler (2006).
2 Lindley et al. (1979) and Lindley (1986) talk about 'true' expected values in this way.
3 Following Harrison & March (1984).
4 Quote and (adapted) image from Russell & Norvig (2009), pp. 618-619.
5 Smith & Winkler (2006).
References
Harrison & March (1984). Decision making and postdecision surprises. Administrative Science Quarterly, 29: 26–42.
Lindley, Tversky, & Brown. 1979. On the reconciliation of probability assessments. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 142: 146–180.
Lindley (1986). The reconciliation of decision analyses. Operations Research, 34: 289–295.
Russell & Norvig (2009). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Third Edition. Prentice Hall.
Smith & Winkler (2006). The optimizer's curse: Skepticism and postdecision surprise in decision analysis. Management Science, 52: 311-322.