Neither it was common before, Objective-C, C++, Eiffel are probably the only known ones with mainstream market share that actually went via the compile to C as initial implementation.
> It used to be that every new language starts off with a translator to C.
No, it really never was that way, though there were some languages (especially ones that started as C plus some additional features, like C++ and Obj-C) that did that.
