Hmm... there is an awful lot buried in that opening post.
Looking at just the subject line my reaction was that "proper editing" is in the eye of the beholder. Many tend to think that proofreading is sufficient editing, but for a lot of books this is the least of their trouble. Ideally a book will see a structural editor at least once (very rare for Indy publishers), a copy editor and a proof reader. The full combination is, if you like, "proper editing".
But then your post moves on to translation and you move out of my experience. I expect that a poor translation can break a good story - but not necessarily so, witness
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas that we have been discussing for the book club. By modern standards the old Victorian era translation is not good, but evidently it has been good enough for the book to be popular for a very long time.
What you seem to be describing as problems sound like structural problems with the story, and it seems unlikely that translation (on its own) is to blame for that. But there may also be cultural differences that may mean a direct translation is simply not up to the task of getting the point and feel across in the new language. Stephen King describes it as a writers' ESP, but much of what he is talking about is a shared culture. I don't know how well his stories sell in translation, but I imagine it would take very talented translators to get it just right.
A lot of structural problems - getting the pacing right and so on - are things that improve with experience. How Indy writer/publishers generally get around the problem of not having a professional structural editor is to just keep trying until we get it right. (Actually, this is true of most traditionally published authors too, since tradpubs don't actually nurture new writers, or not until they've proven that they probably don't need it.)
So, while it may be tempting to answer your subject line with a simple "yes", the truth is that there is a lot a writer learns only by getting published. At some point you have to bite the bullet and say you've done as much as you can, gotten as much help as you can, it's time to publish and see what happens. ... Which is generally very little, in my experience.
