Malayalam Annotation & Transcription Specialist

Obsidian; Dublin; On-site; EUR 24,000 - 38,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is building a Malayalam-language annotation dataset. You will locate publicly accessible Malayalam PDFs that include multimodal elements and annotate their structure, transcription, and metadata with precise reading order.

The role requires native Malayalam, meticulous diacritics handling, and experience with complex layouts. You will perform tasks under a second Malayalam expert review to ensure quality and consistency.

Qualifications

• Native Malayalam speaker with full command of script and diacritics.
• Experience with document annotation, transcription, localization, or proofreading is a plus.
• Excellent attention to character-level accuracy and diacritic marks.
• Systematic and consistent application of taxonomy across pages.

Responsibilities

• Source publicly accessible Malayalam PDFs containing at least one multimodal element and record its source.
• Annotate page structure by bounding regions and assigning component types and reading order indices.
• Record relationships by linking regions to their parent figures or tables.
• Transcribe text faithfully in Malayalam script, including handwritten content when legible.
• Capture page metadata: language, document type, source, dimensions, and flags for tables/handwriting.
• Review a colleague's work through a second Malayalam expert review.

Job description

Fluent Language Skills Required: Malayalam. Native fluency in Malayalam, including full command of Malayalam script and orthography, is required for this position. All annotation and transcription work is performed in Malayalam.

Why This Role Exists

Document understanding breaks down fastest in the languages that parsing and vision-language models rarely see. This project builds training data for exactly those languages: Malayalam, alongside four other Indic scripts, Japanese and Korean. Each task takes a real, publicly available PDF page and produces a complete structural map of that page, paired with a faithful transcription of every text region in the original script.

The dataset deliberately concentrates on the material models handle worst: handwriting, dense multi-column layouts, tables, diagrams, and mixed-script pages. Documents are drawn from newspapers, textbooks, examinations, and everyday formats such as flyers, forms, manuals, menus, brochures, notices and worksheets, so that the corpus reflects the real diversity of Malayalam documents rather than a narrow band of easily parsed ones.

Delivered work is human-authored throughout. Component identification, component typing, reading order and all transcription are performed by people, not generated by parsing models.

What You'll Do

• Source documents: find a publicly accessible Malayalam PDF in an assigned document type, containing at least one multimodal element (images, tables, diagrams, or handwriting), and record where you obtained it




• Annotate structure: identify and bound every meaningful region of the page - document title, section heading, paragraph, list, table, figure, diagram, caption, formula, question, answer field - and assign each a component type and a reading-order index




• Record relationships: link each region to the figure or table it belongs to through a parent component identifier




• Transcribe faithfully: reproduce all text exactly as it appears in Malayalam script, including handwritten content, flagging any region where the source is not legible




• Capture page metadata: language, document type, source, page dimensions, and flags for tables, formulas and handwriting




• Review a colleague's work: every task is reviewed end to end by a second Malayalam expert, and experienced annotators take on that review

Who You Are

• You are a native Malayalam speaker with full command of the script, its diacritics and its conjunct forms




• You have worked with documents: annotation, transcription, translation, localization, subtitling, proofreading, journalism, or regional-language data review




• You are exact: character-level accuracy matters more here than speed, and a single wrong diacritic is a defect




• You are systematic: you apply a taxonomy consistently across hundreds of pages rather than improvising per document




• You are comfortable with unfamiliar layouts: multi-column newspapers, exam papers, handwritten forms

Nice-to-Have Specialties

• Regional-language AI data: annotation, labeling, grading, or bilingual evaluation for training datasets




• Transcription and localization: MTPE, subtitling, bilingual QA, OCR correction or post-editing




• Document production: typesetting, copy-editing, proofreading, or digitization of Malayalam-language material




• Script and encoding: Unicode normalization, Malayalam input methods, numeral-form and character-form accuracy

What Success Looks Like

• Every meaningful region on the page is captured, correctly bounded and correctly typed




• Reading order reflects how the page is actually read, including across columns




• Transcriptions match the source character for character, in Malayalam script rather than transliteration




• Your tasks pass second-expert review the first time




• The documents you bring in add layout diversity rather than repeating templates already in the corpus

Why Join Mercor

• Build the training data that makes document AI work in scripts it currently handles badly




• Work from real published Malayalam documents rather than synthetic or templated pages




• Quality leads on this project: accuracy is the first measure, with handling time tracked alongside it