People who crave money and fame choose other jobs. Babysitting would pay better...even when the work you've translated succeeds brilliantly, few readers even notice that it's yours.
Paid translation was often seen not as a vocation but as a quick source of income...Mikhail Bakunin...impecunious father of anarchism, was translating Marx's Capital for 1,200 rubles when persuaded to ditch the work.