figurative(LANGUAGE)
A literal translation of a text is done by translating each word separately, without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence: 逐字（翻译）的
Her translation is too literal, resulting in unnatural-sounding prose.她的译文太拘泥于字面了，结果成了冗长而不自然的行文。

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Accurate and exact
accuracy
accurate
accurately
aright
authoritative
dime
for all the worldidiom
Goldilocks
got it in one!idiom
in so many wordsidiom
infallible
literally
nose
precisely
slap
strict
strictly
strictly speakingidiom
superaccurate
synchronization

literal | American Dictionary

literal
adjective
us/ˈlɪt̬·ər·əl/
having exactly the same meaning as the basic or original meaning of a word or expression:
a literal interpretation of the Constitution
A literal translation of a phrase in another language gives the meaning of each separate word.

Examples of literal

literal
Within this framework, positive relevance literals denote addition of complexity and detail whilst negative relevance literals denote removal of complexity and detail.
We assume we have a set of items of structured text, and that we will represent these by a set of positive literals.
We represent each news report as a conjunction of classical logic literals.
Our extended definition and the classical one coincide either for definite programs or for general programs whose negative literals have only input positions.
The two definitions coincide either for definite programs or for general programs whose negative literals have only input positions.
Sets of default negated literals are considered as extensions of the program, and a notion of "attack" between these sets is defined.
Intuitively the truth of literals in these sequences must be determined in order to prove or fail the abductive subgoal.
Elementary formulas are literals and the symbols ("false") and ("true").
Defining tightness relative to a set of literals extends the applicability of this method to some programs that are not absolutely tight.
Their bodies usually contain special fluent literals of the form ab(c).
Elementary formulas are literals and the 0-place connectives ("false") and ("true").
The body of rules is composed of negative literals only.
Nevertheless, for the cases in which there are no conflicting literals in the first of the programs, the operators in question would be equivalent.
The first four rules define literals and contrary literals.
One of the main reasons is that, for each predicate mode declaration, the compiler is required to appropriately re-order literals in the predicate's definition.
See all examples of literal
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.