Translating Jobs for 16 Year Olds

by Linda Thao
(La Brea, CA)

Translating Jobs for 16 Year Olds.

When I was sixteen, I worked translating theological books from Latin into English. There were other translators and editors that checked my work, so my job, being only a high-schooler, was to get the basic meaning down to speed up the fine tuning portion of the translations. I would just take one paragraph at a time and look up the meanings and forms of each word, and then try to piece together the meaning of the whole paragraph. (Word order in Latin is fairly arbitrary - often the order is used to create drama or provide poetic value, rather than to change the meaning of the sentence - so it's almost like a word scramble to figure out the meaning)

Working translating jobs for 16 year olds was very tedious subject matter, and I really struggled to stay awake. Sometimes I'd get a fairly bad headache from focusing my eyes on the books for too long. I suppose it was better than manual labor, but it definitely was hard to sit at my desk and look out the window at everything going on during the summer.

The opportunity came to me through a friend of my High School Latin teacher; I was one of the top students in my 3rd year Latin class, and had won some regional awards for Latin contests. I used the money to go to movies, do things with my girlfriend, shop at the mall, eat out at restaurants, and do lots of other things typical teenagers do. My parents covered most of my more necessary expenses.

After about four months of translating jobs for 16 year olds, I get another part-time opportunity learning to program websites in HTML, and I ultimately switched over to that job full-time. I have been doing that ever since. You could really make money online that way.