For my high school English class, which is a translation "workshop," we're all expected to give class-long, individual sessions focusing around a translation we've performed from whatever language we choose to English. The piece/excerpt we choose can be literally anything (about 2-3 pages in length when translated), but most people so far have been doing poetry or short stories where the workshopping part of class focuses around trying to improve shaping of phrases or tweaking little details to augment the meaning or effect on the reader.

Latin's my main foreign language (I'm in a post-AP class, so I feel confident taking a crack at pretty much any text) and I was brainstorming what to translate, but I'm a bit sick of golden-age poetry and historical prose. Instead, I was thinking of doing something completely different and trying some [New Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Latin), maybe some sort of scientific text like Isaac Newton's [Principia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica) or Copernicus' [On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_revolutionibus_orbium_coelestium). 

My questions are: exactly how different are texts like these to what I've done so far (e.g. Pliny, Virgil, Caesar, Cicero, Ovid), and would scientific texts in general be able to make for an interesting discussion about translational nuances (i.e. would they be workshop-able)?