A recent Newsweek story about two of the best-known translators in publishing summed it up well: “One day, at lunch with Carlos Fuentes, Edith Grossman asked him how he had picked up such a vast repertoire of dirty, vulgar and unheard-of slang. He said, ‘Well, number one, when I was a young man I was in bars a lot…secondly, I make it up, so you can invent it, too.’”
