I've had a fascination with languages ever since I learned to read, at the age of 3. I even co-invented a language with my brother when I was 8. Until I decided to translate "Dad" as "Elifnot," and my brother realized it was too similar to "Eliphant" and discarded the whole idea.
My brother went on to devise a new alphabet (which included all kinds of weird diacritics) which he shared with me.
I am bilingual since childhood, having been born in America but raised in Israel, and also have some knowledge of Yiddish and Aramaic.
Later I volunteered for a few years at PGDP (Project Guttenberg's Distributed Proofreaders), Proofing scanned books in order to make them available in text format. I started with English books, but at a certain stage that wasn't interesting enough so I tried my hand at other languages as well.
I discovered you don't need to understand what you are proofing, only to be able to read and pronounce it so you know when the text has scanning errors.
I work as a translator from Hebrew to English. I'd rather do the opposite, but my publisher has no use for English-to-Hebrew translations. I am also translating some works for the Hebrew Wikisource, for fun, but since I don't get paid for that, it goes slowly. I already did Kubla Khan (by S.T. Coleridge) and Cinderella (from the Blue Fairy Book), and am currently working on a Chess treatise (by J.R. Capablanca) and on Beauty and the Beast.