Translation spiel: "give birth to".

I'm finding that I'm getting a translation spiel down for tutorees.

Usually, people say they want to translate "literally", and then I gently re-direct them from that term to the word "faithfully", which is what most people mean when they say "literally".

Then, I say that within the domain of translation, you can render "word-for-word", and you can render "by sense", and sometimes those are the same thing, but sometimes there's a disjunct between the 2, and that's where you have to make a choice.

The example I use for that is the English phrase "give birth to".

In Latin, you would say "genuit" for "gave birth to", as in - "genuit puerum" ('she gave birth to a son').

Now, if we were reverse translating from English to Latin, would we translate each separate word of the phrase into Latin, and come up with something like "dedit (=gave) nativitatem (=birth) puero (="to the son")"?

Of course we wouldn't, that would be hash!

For some reason, I find that example really makes things click for my students, and makes them start thinking about 'turns of phrase' in English and Latin and how they're not commensurable.