Is literality of translation related to syntax?

Question

I look for references in linguistic, in contrastive linguistic, translatolgy about literality of translation of a single sentence in term of syntax conservation? Does someone created an measure of literality? I am aware of Nida's theories and others ... but everybody proposes some categories of translation ... sort of dicotomies, not based on syntax but on semantics.
I don't look for those semantic based or cultural based approaches; I look for approaches based on measurable aspect of the translation, like number of words translated literalily or percentage of phrases(NPs,VPs,...) conserved within a sentence .

Answer 1

You're going to encounter HUGE problems worrying about the exact translation of text based on syntax alone. For example, in Shoshoni the future is expressed by the suffix -tu'ih on the verb stem, so hipitu'ih is the future form of hipi 'drink'. However, there are two ways to translate this "literally" into English since English has two different future constructions now--"I will drink" "I am going to drink". Both of these translations mean exactly the same thing and both are "literal" translations of the Shoshoni since "be going to" is exactly equivalent to "will" in contemporary English. Yet if you try to establish some sort of heuristic based solely on "syntax" in which "will" receives a better "literalness" score than "be going to" you have falsified the fact that both translations are exactly equivalent.