When Edith Grossman was translating a novel by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, she was struggling with how to handle the ubiquitous slang. One day, at lunch with Fuentes, 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,’” Grossman recalls. “I said, ‘You made it up? No wonder I couldn’t figure out what these phrases meant.’ So I made it up too.” For inspiration, she would sit near adolescent boys in the subway and listen to them talk, she says.

This is just one of the tricks Grossman has picked up during a four-decade-long career translating some of the best-known Spanish-language books in the world—from Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. More.

See: Newsweek

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