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The Huffington Post dedicates 2,000 words to the celebration of translation as an art form. Let’s shout it from the rooftop! They interview Edith Grossman, one of the art form’s most renowned practitioners, who expounds on this truth in her book Why Translation Matters.

If you only speak English and have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels or Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, you’ve probably read Grossman’s translations. She is highly regarded for her work, and in steady demand.

The art, Grossman and others will say, is more than finding the appropriate word. Translation is about words and music, fidelity and feel, the balance between getting too caught up in the literal meaning and improvising so freely that the author’s voice is lost entirely.

In “Why Translation Matters,” Grossman writes of taking on the opening phrase of the first chapter of “Don Quixote,” among the most famous words in Spanish literature: “En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme,” which in an earlier English-language edition was translated into, “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind.”

It may surprise you to know that only 3% of books released in the U.S. are translated from other languages, compared to numbers in the double digits in Western Europe. This probably says a lot about our worldview in general, but in terms of literature specifically, we’re really missing out! And thus, the added importance of literary translators, who function as cultural bridges and messengers.

“It seems that the American public is allergic to certain kinds of books. When people sense somehow that the book is a translation, they think, in a subliminal sort of way, that they don’t need to read it,” says Daniel Halpern, editorial director of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins that commissioned Grossman for the “Don Quixote” translation.

But, is it the American public who’s lazy, or book publishers? Many don’t want to get involved because of the extra work. Read more opinions about the state of literary translation in the U.S. in the full article, here.