LITERALNESS • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Literalness

... still on, they had somehow lost significance and colour, and that all the meaning and the dominance of the situation had gathered into the person of a woman of the East who danced. She was almost discordant in her literalness, in her clear olive tints and the kol smudges under her eyes, the string of coins in the mass of her fallen hair, and her unfettered body. Beside her the slave-girls, crouching, looked like painted shells. She danced before Pilate in strange Eastern ways, in plastic weavings ...

— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... its extremely literal character. It is the translator's aim to represent every Greek word, even the article, by a corresponding Syriac word, even where the idiom of the language must thereby be violated. Hence its style is of necessity barbarous. But this very character of literalness gives to the Philoxenian version high authority in respect to textual criticism. So far as it has come down to us in its primitive form, it is, in truth, equal to the Greek text of its ...

— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows