I find literal translations to be more useful for “tinkering”. As in, when I really want to pry a grammar point open and don’t care about the meaning of the sentence but rather the construction and its English analogues.
Typically, this means I learn next to nothing about its functional usage in natural situations.
What the context aware translations help you with is getting you into the metal model of expressing your base language sentiments within a new framework of verbal articulation and mental concepts.
これは明日までに終わらなくてもいいから
Does not express the following English sentiment
Because it’s fine if this does not get done by tomorrow
It expresses the following:
No worries if it’s not done by tomorrow
When trying to convey the meaning above no-one “thinks” in the former. And we use language to express what we think.
In fact, my dearest ambition is to stop thinking of から as “because” even if that’s its closest English analogue used in translation. Instead I want to think of it as “marker of provenance”, but in a wibbly wobbly, feely kind of way. This is not something I can achieve if I primarily have literal translations rattling about in my brain.
What we all want to be able to do is take the latter sentiment and express it in Japanese. Therefore in our minds we need to associate all the nuance of the English sentiment with the construction of the Japanese.
That model needs to be second nature, there can’t be an additional mapping along the way; we’ll never achieve the goal if there is a “transliteration layer” in between or if we only have a mapping to the transliteration.
To put it another likely even more convoluted way,
Knowing that this is a 3 x 5 brick does not let you express that you want to build a cockpit
The magic, is knowing that a cockpit can be built from a 3 x 5 brick and that lets you make it reality.
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