Ich habe mir eine schlimme Erkältung eingefangen

Hi, 

I have just seen this sentence.
"Ich habe mir eine schlimme Erkältung eingefangen"

When I check the word "eingefangen" I can see that it means "to catch".

Is it correct that the direct translation would be something like "I have catch myself a very cold"?

You could translate this literally as " I have caught myself a bad cold", but of course you would not include "mir" when translating into English.
You would probably say "I've caught a bad cold" 

Hi RexV and sfpugh, 

“I have / I’ve caught a bad cold“ is probably the closest translation to Ich habe mir eine schlimme Erkältung eingefangen. 

The thing with learning a new language is that you usually can’t translate a sentence word for word from one language to another, as often it just wouldn’t make much sense. 

A good strategy is to look at the sentence as a whole, understand the meaning, then translate it into the other language. This will help you to get a feel for how German works. It is also something that will get easier over time.

Tschüss
Julia