One noteworthy thing is that the author of this essay is a prominent and successful literary translator. Other ideas in this piece:
* People are losing familiarity with their nations' or languages' own historic literary cultures (because of a mixture of guilt, technology, and cultural globalization).
* Literary translation sometimes gives an illusion of familiarity when readers are still missing out on much (much!) more context than they think.
* There is an awkwardness in the fact that literary translation into English is more important, prestigious, useful, sought-after, etc., than literary translation to any other language whatsoever. The success and prominence of this enterprise means that many people around the world are becoming moderately familiar with some foreign writers, in a way that the author fears may be more superficial than readers realize, while remaining ignorant (and increasingly so) of classic and contemporary writing in their own languages by their own compatriots.
* The lossiness of translation that's especially bothering the author here is not so much lossiness in the language but lossiness in the cultural context. That is, you may actually understand words and sentences very well in translation, and follow what's going on in a novel and how it was described, but still be missing a ton that another acculturated reader would have picked up on. Maybe an analogy to this is the way that we miss so much today when reading Shakespeare, not just because of his use of words that we don't recognize, but also because of a steady stream of references that we miss. Shakespeare is also often making a lot of sexual jokes that most readers today don't even notice.