Literal translation feels safe. Every word accounted for, nothing invented. And that's exactly why it fails, it's wrong with a straight face.
Meaning doesn't live in words. It lives in the gaps between them: idiom, register, what's deliberately left unsaid. Translate literally and you faithfully reproduce the skeleton while losing the body.
The classic trap
Te quiero and te amo both "mean" I love you. Translate either one literally and you erase the entire distance between a friend and a lover. The literal version isn't a smaller truth, it's a confident falsehood, because it claims completeness it doesn't have.
What good translators (and good systems) actually do
They don't move words. They move intent, and accept that to keep the meaning, the words have to change. This is the same discipline I want in AI tools: optimize for what the person meant, not for surface fidelity. Faithfulness to the words is often betrayal of the meaning.