This is not correct. Please don’t talk about these issues without spending sufficient time to understand the underlying issues (and even then, most people shouldn’t).
Transcribing a package is absolutely legal provided the original license is respected.
To clarify this a little more: under copyright law, by default, usage rights are very limited. A license grants more rights, provided the provisions of the license are respected. The GPL (and MIT, BSD, etc.) provides the legal right to use someone else’s copyrighted code under those specific terms.
One of the rights explicitly enumerated in the GPL is the right to modify, which is commonly understood to include rewriting with a substantially similar structure in a different language. Such a “transcribed” package would be fully legal to distribute as long as done under the GPL.