> If I publish a list in pig-latin, can I deem it illegal to translate that into English?

Yes, you are the sole publisher and owner of the rights to your list (IANAL but I took a course of history of publishing.). That's why you have some copyright notices in translated novels such as ~"publishing rights for the french/english/spanish version granted to $publisher".

> If I publish something in 8-bit ASCII, can I deem it illegal to "translate" that into English?

I am almost sure that in that case the appropriate verb is "to transcode" or "to convert". This is not a translation but a re-transcription which is still governed by copyright laws anyway.

Keep in mind that copyright laws regarding books are based on the publishing rights the author sells to a publisher not the ideas expressed.

IANAL, but many European countries have something called "Database copyright" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_European_...). Basically if you build a database of something you can get a copyright for the database as a whole, even if there's no copyright for the individual items. I wouldn't surprise me if the German government claims that their list falls under these database copyright laws. But even if that's the case there would still be the question how copyright treaties affect such a copyright and if this copyright is enforcable in the United States.

Hm. Would that still apply given that - if I read this right - the list of hashes are distributed publicly?

What is the license under which those hashes are distributed? Just because something is distributed publicly doesn't mean it can be legally redistributed.

Then don't redistribute it, just distribute the step-by-step directions required to reverse it [1] (as is done on a site linked by the original article)

[1] - of course, directions could be just source that does it for you, a la DeCSS

Isnt that basically the DMCA?