Thank you for sharing. I will take a look at the paper. 
Personally, I have come to think that the term “literal translation” is a harmful misnomer which distorts the ideas of translators and readers. I think a better term for what people usually refer to is something like a “gloss translation” or maybe even “gloss semi-translation” as often such ‘translations’ do not even render the sentences into the proper grammar of the target language.
For those who don’t know, a “gloss” refers to when you annotate the words of a text, explaining a more literal meaning of the word and the various morphological pieces of the word, such as affixes, which add grammatical meaning. For example:
Cogito ergo sum
cogitate-1.PIND therefore be-1.PIND
This gloss tells us that we have a verb in the first person present indicative, a particle, and another verb in first person present indicative. If we were to render it into a “translation gloss,” we would just do the minimal amount of change possible to make the above gloss into a mostly grammatical English sentence.
When we are dealing with mostly simple sentences that are close, semantically and grammatically, to the structure of the target language, usually the result will look relatively okay. But once the sentences start getting more complex and more distant from the target language, they become less and less natural.
Part of why I think the terminology in common use of “literal translation” is problematic is that it gives the impression that what you read in the translation is what the original text feels or seems like. But that is not the case, because the original text would read like a fluent, native piece of language that a competent speaker would compose.
For example, imagine reading a native English novel. The English there would normally be fluent, coherent, and sound native. If you try to render a “‘literal’” translation of that to, say, Tibetan, the product would not read like a fluent, coherent, native Tibetan text. The effect would rather be a clunky and foreign-sounding text which gives the reader an exotic impression that they are not reading something normal to them. Moreover, much of the meaning and richness of the original English will be lost to the clunky glossing in Tibetan, and the contribution of the nuances of English grammar will also mostly be lost.
The product would be far from “literal” and more like a cultural adaptation to make a foreign sounding text which captures the rough gist of the original. It is very far from literal or “close to the original.” It is highly interpretive and subjective which parts of the text get more ‘nativized’ and naturalized, and which parts left in a state of more clunky gloss by the translator. And if they use square brackets, even more so, because there is the subjective sense of what is more “literal” and what is more “interpretive.” It is really just a sham of language to call such translations literal.
It also assumes that somehow the dictionary definitions of words and the grammatical pieces are more meaningful than the sentences or context of the phrases. This is simply a naive view of language which is not representative of how it works. It is closer to a fantasy of gloss-makers of how they wish language operated than anything close to what actual language is.
Pardon my strict language on this 
At the end of the day, different renderings all have their place. But I do feel people should be made more aware of this problem so that they don’t get fooled.
It’s hard to even agree on what literal means literally! 
I will update my essay in time.
. I plan to read it more slowly because it introduces some terminology and context I’d like to acquire.