I believe, this was an idea in ALGOL, not sure which iteration.

I think, the reason it was never implemented was that more translation = more complicated debugging. It also means that programmers have a more distorted and incomplete model of the program they are writing, i.e. more bugs.

NB. Lisp, as originally envisioned by McCarthy, had one more translation layer (the translated version had square brackets instead of the parenthesis), but it didn't take off for, basically, the same reason.

So... while I understand the benefits you see from doing what you suggest, I think that at the same time the downside makes this not worth pursuing.