The question:

How to translate a text: word for word or sentence for sentence?

I have probably already done what you are considering now. As a marketing specialist, an applications engineer, a purchasing manager, an R&D professional, a CEO, as an apprentice, as an engineering graduate or as an MBA.

- Maybe you are planning English language online documentation or a website, these I produced personally from the beginning of the Internet.
- Was it in Asia? Setting out English language contracts for sales and service representatives? During these years, I became "overseas sales manager for a German family company.
- Did I get this experience then I introduced English language DTP and multi-language service documentation and handbooks for technically complicated equipment for a 1000 person German company?
- Does your project remind me of the automated English quotation texts, that I produced including hundreds of options in preparation for the opening of the US market.
- Maybe your project reminds me of the work I did with a lawyer, to patent a unique technical solution.
- Possibly your project is similar to the countless technical brochures and catalogs I conceived and produced, going back to the early 1980s.

Also in past lives, I applied and worked to the War Weapon Control Law and can still recite MIL STD 810D backwards.

So the answer to my question above is that I translate a document as a whole, while considering aspects that are relevant to your customer. I rely on my experience to know what is relevant.

So adding all this together, I translate a text for the reader, keeping the objectives of the writer in mind.