Expat programmer rewrites career in China

Joshua Dyer performs at the 2013 Midi Festival in Beijing. Photo provided to China Daily

As a freelancer, he usually makes between $25 and $40 an hour, based on the volume of text he translates. Dyer can earn up to four times the average Beijing monthly salary, but periods of frantic typing over the years have taken a toll on his fingers.

The pain on them has also affected his music. He plays the guitar and dobro for Randy Abel Stable, a semi-professional alternative country band based in Beijing. Last year, he decided to shift the bulk of his work to literary and art translations.

Dyer has done short stories that are published in the literary magazine Pathlight, including Li Zhishu's Bei Bianchui (Northern Border), which talks about the loss of cultural identity among Chinese people living in Malaysia.

Though literary and art translations pay less than those for video games, Dyer welcomes the gentler work pace. It's not only good for his body but also his spirit, giving him the opportunity to immerse himself in worlds that authors weave.

He describes the process as going from a world of Chinese words to an "inner world of pure thought and feeling", and re-emerging into a world of English words. "It's a weird kind of concentration, but it's a very beautiful feeling," Dyer says, adding that it's an experience absent from the straightforward translations for games.

Even as a professional translator, he sometimes loses his fluency in Chinese. He spends the majority of his days working alone - reading, typing and writing - rather than conversing in Chinese.

"I worked in-house at a Chinese game company for one year when I first got started," he says, "and I used to give presentations at that company in Chinese. I would be panicked to do that now because my oral Chinese is rusty."

But he couldn't be happier with the professional niche he has found. Losing his job in the dot-com bust turned out to be the springboard for another career.

Column: My Chinese Dream