Literal translation refers to the result of translating text from one language to another; translating each word independently as opposed to translating the entire phrase. Literal translations also ignore idioms. Look up Idiom in Wiktionary, the free dictionary An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not compositional—that is, whose meaning does not follow from the meaning of the individual words of which it is composed. ...

"Kindergarten" is a term meaning the year of school between pre-school and first grade in the United States. The word comes from German where a literal transation would be, "garden of children."

Early machine translations were notorious for this type of translation. Although improved substantially, idioms still pose problems. Machine translation (MT) is a form of translation where a computer program analyses the text in one language — the source text — and then attempts to produce another, equivalent text in another language — the target text — without human intervention. ...

An example of early machine translation is the somewhat famous translation of, "The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak." into Russian. Which when back-translated from Russian to English resulted in, "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten." The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

Often, first generation immigrants create something of a literal translation in how they speak their parents' native language. This results in a mix of the two languages in something of a pidgin. Many such mixes have specific names, e.g. Spanglish or Germish. For example, American children of German immigrants are heard using "rockingstool" for "rocking chair" instead of the correct German "Schaukelstuhl." A Pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of a mixture of other languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues. ... Spanglish, a portmanteau of the words Spanish and English, is a name used to refer to a range of language-contact phenomena, primarily in the speech of the Hispanic population of the USA, which is exposed to both Spanish and English. ... Germish (in German Denglisch), a portmanteau of the words German and English, also referred to as Denglish, Engleutsch, Germlish, Genglish or Ginglish describes language based on the German grammar that includes a jumble of English and pseudo-English idioms, or vice versa. ...