Literal Translation
Sometimes being too literal can also be a problem, especially when we're trying to convey ideas from another tongue in English. Literal translation, or rendering foreign words by their primary definitions in another language, works as long as we're dealing with straightforward word correlations, such as the Latin corpus to the English body. Conversely, literally translating words and phrases that have a figurative meaning in common usage - known as idioms or idiomatic expressions - disables readers from fully understanding what was being said in the native language. For instance, literally translating the Latin phrase habeas corpus as 'let you have the body' does not help us comprehend its usage as a legal idiom in Rome (or America