The following quotes are from Martin Luther’s “An Open Letter on Translation,” where he is answering allegations of not being “literal” in his German translation from the Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. Funny how the essence of things don’t really change. You can read this letter at Project Gutenberg.

We do not have to ask about the literal Latin or how we are to speak German… Rather we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common person in the market about this. We must be guided by their tongue, the manner of their speech, and do our translating accordingly. Then they will understand it and recognize that we are speaking German to them.

For instance, Christ says: Ex abundatia cordis os loquitur. if I am to follow these asses ¹, they will lay the original before me literally and translate it as: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” Is that speaking with a German tongue? What German could understand something like that? What is this “abundance of the heart?” No German can say that… but the mother in the home and the common man say this: “What fills the heart overflows the mouth.” That is speaking with the proper German tongue of the kind I have tried for, although unfortunately not always successfully. The literal Latin is a great barrier to speaking proper German.

and my favorite:

Now when the angel greets Mary, he says: “Greetings to you, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.” Well up to this point, this has simply been translated from simple Latin, but tell me is that good German? Since when does a German speak like that- being “full of grace”? One would have to think about a keg “full of” beer or a purse “full of” money. So i translated it: “You gracious one”. This way a German can at last think about what the angel meant by this greeting. Yet the papists rant about me corrupting the angelic greeting- and I still have not used the most satisfactory German translation. What if I had used the most satisfactory German and translated the salutation: “God says hello, Mary dear” (for that is what the angel was intending to say and what he would have said had he even been German!). If I had, I believe that they would have hanged themselves out of their great devotion to dear Mary and because I have destroyed the greeting.”

-Martin Luther, An Open Letter on Translating