[Nadya]

>Turns out knowing more than one language isn't a rare or sought after skill. In Europe maybe 40% of the population knows multiple languages fluently. Perhaps a third of these write well enough to translate.

Depending on the combination of languages - it is an extremely rare skill! Just being multilingual is not enough, you need to be multilingual in the correct combination of two languages! Although a majority of translations are English->Target language, that is not always the case.

How many people know both Japanese and Arabic well enough to translate? How about Mandarin Chinese and German? Portuguese and Danish? French and Tagalog? Hokkien and Russian?

Your second point "sought after" is the important part. How much demand for Russian books are there for Hokkien speakers? No demand - no money.

[a_t48]

Along with that, you also have to know how to translate into a format that people actually want to read. You can translate a work into a different language, but you may lose the spirit of the work in the process by writing words that are technically a "correct" translation, but end up being very dry or boring to read, compared to the original work.