Short answers, pulled from the story.
The term writer is used as a synonym for author, though the latter has a somewhat broader meaning and conveys legal responsibility for a piece of writing, even if its composition is anonymous, unknown, or collaborative. Author most often refers to the writer of a book specifically.
Writers have been persecuted because skilled writers influence ideas and society. Examples include William Tyndale, who was executed around 1536 for translating the Bible into English; Galileo Galilei, sentenced to imprisonment for heresy in 1642 for writing in support of heliocentrism; and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, imprisoned by Soviet authorities, whose book Cancer Ward had to gain the approval of the USSR Union of Writers before legal publication.
Writers use pseudonyms to separate their writing from other work, to reduce prejudice against women or writers of a particular race, to reduce political or personal risk, or to make their name suit another language. Well-known examples include George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair; George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans; and Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
Writers have been motivated by anger, financial necessity, teaching, entertainment, and the desire to influence opinion. Martin Luther wrote the Ninety-five Theses in 1517 out of anger at religious corruption. Frances Trollope turned to writing to save her family from ruin, producing her book Domestic Manners of the Americans after age fifty, having never written before. George Orwell addressed the question of motivation directly in his 1946 essay "Why I Write."
Translators have had significant cultural impact. Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and published the first translation of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs in 1822. Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ibn Matar translated Euclid's Elements from Greek into Arabic. Translation is especially difficult when words carry connotations, rhymes, or puns that have no equivalent in the target language.
The Authorized King James Version of the Bible was sponsored by King James VI of England in 1604 and completed by six committees working in Cambridge and Oxford, each assigned different sections of the text. Published in 1611, it has been described as an "everlasting miracle" for balancing accessibility with beauty and simplicity with majesty.