I don't want to get too off topic, but to sum it up, I started translating in high school when I found a Japanese game spinoff of an anime I really liked, and I translated it using online translators and dictionaries for several years until I eventually picked up enough of the language that I didn't need to heavily rely on those anymore. Honestly, it took a long time before I got good enough to move on to light novels, and even then my translations were pretty rough for a good while. By my reckoning, I only became a decent translator around the time that I started Volume 2 of F/A.