Dominant words for 'translation' in most (Western) European languages (such as translation, traducción, traduction, and Übersetzung) represent central cognitive metaphors for translation, signifying such things as carrying, setting, or leading across. These metaphors for textual translation became dominant in the late Middle Ages, associated with pressures to translate the Bible into the vernacular languages and encoding orientations related to the beginnings of the European age of imperialism. In a densely woven argument, this article demonstrates that the ascendancy of dominant contemporary Eurocentric cognitive metaphors for 'translation' inverted Cicero's valorization of sense-for-sense over word-for-word translation, resulting in a pervasive orientation toward literalism in modern Eurocentric expectations about textual translation. The metaphors suggest there should be full semantic transfer between source text and target text and that protocols for achieving such results are possible. A central contention is that the strength of these metaphors rests in large part on Western European sacralization of the word, itself a consequence of the early Christian translation of the logos of God in New Testament Greek as verbum, 'word (Word)', in Latin translations of the Bible, with the result that Jesus became equated with the Word become flesh. This metaphorical conceptualization persists in vernacular translations of the Bible into Western European languages to the present, contributing to the view of words themselves as numinous and the valorization of literalism in translation and other domains.