In his Translation and the Trials of The Foreign (1985), Antoine Berman criticizes the strategy of "naturalization," i.e. bringing the translated text as close as possible to the receiving culture.

The properly ethical aim of the translating act is receiving the foreign as foreign.

Berman's  "negative analytic" studies the system of textual  deformation in translation, which "naturalizes" the text into the receiving culture at the expense of its "foreign" qualities.

The negative analytic is primarily concerned with ethnocentric, annexationist translations and hyper-textual translations (pastiche, imitation, adaptation, free writing), where the play of deforming forces is freely exercised.If one of the principal problems of poetic translation is to respect the polysemy of the poem, then the principal problem of translating the novel is to respect its shapeless polylogic and avoid an arbitrary homogenisation.

Berman’s proposal for counterbalancing the deforming tendencies is the translation which preserves the foreign in the target text. He designated it as “literal translation:”

Here ‘literal’ means: attached to the letter (of works). Labor on the letter in translation is more originary than restitution of meaning. It is through this labor that translation, on the one hand, restores the particular signifying process of works (which is more than their meaning) and, on the other hand, transforms the translating language.

Antoine Berman, "La traduction comme epreuve de l'etranger," [Translation and the trials of the foreign] Texte 4 (1985): 67-81. Download full text.