laŭvorta

Take it apart and it defines itself: laŭ according to, vorto a word, -a the adjective ending. According to the words. English says literal, which is Latin for "according to the letters"; Esperanto counts in words rather than letters, and word-for-word is the more useful unit anyway.

Laŭ- is quietly productive as a prefix element and this is not the first one the course has met. Laŭdire, at rank 1907, is laŭ plus diri: according to what is said, hence "reportedly" or "allegedly". Others you will meet without needing a dictionary: laŭleĝa lawful, laŭvica in turn, laŭeble as far as possible, laŭplaĉe as you please. Once laŭ is fixed as "in accordance with", the whole set reads itself.

The adverb laŭvorte is the form you will actually use most, because the criticism usually attaches to the act rather than the thing: ne traduku laŭvorte.

The translation register. Laŭvorta traduko is the standard term for a word-for-word translation, and in almost every context in which somebody uses it, it is a complaint. A literal translation is what you get when the translator has rendered the words and missed the sentence. The opposite is not a loose translation but an accurate one: senca traduko, according to the senco. This matters more in Esperanto than in most languages, because a large part of the community's daily work is moving text between languages, and laŭvorta is the diagnosis they reach for when a sentence is grammatical, comprehensible and clearly not written in Esperanto.