being a translator isn't as effective as publishing something of your own by far.
Publishing your own scientific paper brings you more rewards, but translating other person's article requires less time and less scientific skills (just enough to understand the vocabulary and follow the arguments).
If someone would pay me for doing it, I would probably love to have a job of translating scientific articles to my language. It would be much easier for me to translate dozen articles than to create one. And if I would only translate the articles that passed some filter, for example those published in peer-reviewed journals, I could probably translate the output of twenty or fifty scientists.
It seems like there could definitely be money in 'international' journals for different fields, which would aggregate credible foreign papers and translate them. Interesting that they don't seem to exist.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.