Embodiments of the invention are directed to a DEFLATE compression accelerator and to a method for reducing a latch count required for symbol sorting when generating a dynamic Huffman table. The accelerator includes an input buffer and a Lempel-Ziv 77 (LZ77) compressor communicatively coupled to an output of the input buffer. The accelerator further includes a Huffman encoder communicatively coupled to the LZ77 compressor. The Huffman encoder includes a bit translator. The accelerator further includes an output buffer communicatively coupled to the Huffman encoder.