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I was trying to translate this sentence:

僕はアルバイトしてはレコードばかり買っていたから、一日半働けばLP一枚買えるな、と思って働いていた。

I think I get the overall meaning as: Because I spent all my wages on records I went to work thinking "If I work a day and a half I can buy an LP."

But I'm confused by the アルバイトしては

What's going on with the grammar here?

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I think it might be sense 3 of this Daijirin definition, which defines it as …するときはいつも…する, which I think can be defined as "whenever (you) do ..., (you) do ...":

僕はアルバイトしてはレコードばかり買っていたから、一日半働けばLP一枚買えるな、と思って働いていた。
Whenever I was working part-time, I was solely buying records, so I was working thinking that if I work for a day and a half, I can buy an LP.

For example, from Daijisen:

幼い頃は電車を見ては喜んでいた。
When I was young, whenever I saw a train I was delighted.

I think this is distinct from another similar usage of ～ては (sense 4 at Daijirin), which is defined as two actions etc which make a pair and are repeated, for example:

ころんでは起き、ころんでは起きて…
(I) alternate between falling down and getting up, falling down and getting up...

Edit: Reverted the definition to an earlier version based on suggestions in the comments.

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  • I think you have the right definition, but the original sentence feels more like this to me: "Each time that A (which would happen repeatedly), then always B would follow", i.e. "I was constantly buying records every time I did a little (part-time) work". See the entry under くり返し here for another example.
    – Hyperworm
    Commented Sep 1, 2012 at 13:20
  • @Hyperworm thanks for the comment - I think you're right, I actually originally wrote "whenever" instead of "alternate between" in the first revision, but I was having trouble finding that usage in Daijisen. It looks to me that Daijisen's sense 3 might include both sense 3+4 from Daijirin.
    – cypher
    Commented Sep 1, 2012 at 14:16
  • Sorry, I missed your earlier revisions :) I felt a little uneasy about posting that comment because I couldn't see a better match in Daijisen than (3), either; luckily I came across that weblio/Kenkyusha entry.
    – Hyperworm
    Commented Sep 1, 2012 at 14:27
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Think of しては as a contraction of して、あとは as in

僕はバイトして、あとはレコードばかり買っていた……

and look over the fact that there are two topic markers は in the sentence now.

It then means, that apart from work, all 僕 did was buy records.

This construction can be used with other words as well.

僕は食べては、寝ていただけです。

Apart from eating, all I did was sleep.

The point is that the second phrase expresses some restricted action, e.g. using だけ, のみ or ばかり (or しか+neg.).

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