Unless you plan to pursue it through to a post-graduate degree, I would say it is a waste of time and money.
Translation gigs are based on proven and demonstrated translation skills and nobody in the field will be impressed by a piece of paper hanging on the wall, all the more so for an A.A. Degree. I've seen the level of Japanese that gets covered in a couple years of college.....and it ain't much.
Spend your time and money toward acquiring marketable job skills. If its in something you have a passion about, so much the better. The world is already awash in over-educated under-employable people who got degrees in useless fields.
Read this.
Translation also isn't a simple matter of knowing two languages and just swapping stuff back and forth; it is a completely different set of skills to merely being bilingual. In addition to extensive facility with both languages, you're going to need to be well-versed in whatever field you translate in. You looking to do medical? Technical? Literary? Movie subtitles? Financial? Legal? In order to do a credible job translating you're going to have to develop a fairly decent working knowledge of whatever field your target customers are in.
Yes, translation is a discipline unto itself and you should never make the common mistake of believing that just learning another language is going to make you a translator. Nor should you assume going into the study that you will come out on the far end competent to do it, that you'll be able to make a living at it, or that you'll even like doing it.
As an aside, I've always been against the use of much translating when learning Japanese....unless you're learning for the specific goal of becoming a translator. I've always been disgusted with the awful results I have seen from the use of the grammar translation method in Japan for English education, for one thing. I believe that doing translation in either direction is a crutch and a hindrance to developing any facility with the target language. Look at it logically: in order to translate a sentence, you must first be able to understand what is being said; if you can understand what is being said, why on earth would you need or want to translate it? You may say that's alright for listening, but what about for speaking? Don't you have to translate your English thought into Japanese first before speaking? If you have done sufficient drilling of patterns and built up enough practice and practical experience, the answer is an emphatic, "No, you don't.". You don't have to construct a whole Japanese sentence in your head before you start speaking. You start in talking and create the sentences on-the-fly....just as you do in English. This is why I maintain that learning Japanese should be approached in different ways depending on what you hope to get out of it. Just learning Japanese well won't necessarily make you a good translator and learning to translate well won't necessarily make you fluent in Japanese. There isn't a direct and absolute correlation between the two.
Unfortunately, there is no way of even knowing if you would like working in the field or even any meaningful way of experiencing it beforehand to help you make a decision. Just suffice it to say that puzzling your way through a few sentences from a manga you like with the help of dictionaries and reference materials for fun and at your own leisure is entirely different from the responsibility of having to churn out accurate and polished renditions of material that may bore you to tears and to do it on a deadline.
