There is a tendency to believe that the practical (especially technical) translator, the one who 'does' rather than teaches or theorizes, is somehow divorced from the fuller picture of how translation 'works' and is somehow less skilled in delivering the 'perfect' final product. As somebody who has experience of both technical and literary translation, the author discusses and illustrates a 'working' approach to the apparently opposed ideas of literal and free translation. A more practical view is that of a ‘spectrum’, with the totally literal at one extreme and the totally free at the other: this idea has usually been applied to one translation as a whole, whereas a more accurate perspective would be to consider each element of the text as finding its own position within that spectrum, as the content and context both fluctuate.