Yang Yuefei , 24, is not a musician, but he considers his transcription machine no less of an instrument. He loves the musical flow of words when he transcribes speech into writing, and he enjoys the world that transcribing has opened up to him.
You first worked as a management trainee in a processed meat factory after school. Why did you leave that stable job?
I'm from the countryside of Henan, and after junior high school, I decided to attend a technical school, since our family had no money to send me to university anyway. After graduation I joined the Shandong factory of a very famous Henan processed meat brand. I worked for a year as a factory floor worker from 7am until midnight, seven days a week. I was being trained to become a supervisor eventually. However, the long hours and the repetitiveness of the work exhausted me. I felt as if I was a machine and lost all passion. That's not right for a young man. A young man should have dreams. When I left, I didn't dare tell my family. I was 17.
How did you become a transcriber?
On the train leaving Shandong, I borrowed a newspaper from the man sitting next to me, and in it was a long feature interview with a young man in his early 20s who ran a successful transcription business. It was first time I'd heard of transcription, and I became very interested. I have always loved reading, and a job involving words sounded appealing. Moreover, his success at such a young age greatly impressed me. I put the thought aside when I arrived in Zhengzhou [Henan's capital]. I needed a job immediately and a transcription machine cost a fortune. I had no idea where to get one, either. Transcription was a new industry then. I worked in sales for several months, selling everything from cosmetics to telephone cards. Then one day as I was running around town, I saw an advertisement selling a training course in transcription for 10,000 yuan. I decided to come clean with my family and borrow money from my father. He agreed, but he asked me to first try it out for one month to see if I liked it. Initially I couldn't get the feel for transcribing, but I persisted because I didn't want to waste my father's money. Then after four months, I began to catch up with students who started four months before me.
How does it work?
You have this machine called the Yawei transcriber, named after its inventor, Tang Yawei, which breaks down every Chinese character into elements based on a special code derived from the pinyin system, allowing all characters to be typed with a combination of 24 keys. So during the training, for the first few months we had to learn to memorise the elements, then in the subsequent months, we went through rounds and rounds of training to raise our speed. Don't ask me how many elements there are in the special code; it's already become second nature to me now when I hear a word my fingers just automatically reach for the corresponding keys. If I am transcribing contents I'm familiar with, I could do it without thinking. With unfamiliar terms I need to concentrate more at first. Since the transcribing machine was only invented in the early 1990s, transcription as an occupation only became popular earlier this decade. The National People's Congress, the courts and the government train their own transcribers. I work mainly for the media, transcribing reporters' interviews for TV stations, transcribing at live events, and sometimes I am hired by media to transcribe for live online broadcasts at government press conferences.