Bengali Transcription and Annotation Expert

Obsidian; Mumbai; On-site; INR 450,000 - 600,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is seeking meticulous Bengali language annotators to build high-quality transcription and layout-annotation data. The role focuses on translating complex Bengali documents with dense layouts, multi-column formats, and handwritten content, ensuring exact transcription and precise reading order.

Ideal candidates are native Bengali speakers with experience in document annotation and proofreading, capable of handling diverse Bengali texts and ensuring consistency across hundreds of pages.

Qualifications

• You are a native Bengali speaker with full command of the Bengali script, including diacritics and conjunct forms.
• You have worked with documents: annotation, transcription, localization, subtitling, proofreading, journalism, or regional-language data review.
• You are exact: character-level accuracy matters; a single wrong diacritic is a defect.

Responsibilities

• Source Bengali PDFs in assigned document types containing multimodal elements and record the source.
• Annotate structure by bounding meaningful regions and assign component types and reading-order indices.
• Record relationships by linking regions to their parent figures or tables.
• Transcribe faithfully: reproduce Bengali text exactly as it appears, flag illegible regions.
• Capture page metadata: language, document type, source, page dimensions, flags for tables, formulas and handwriting.
• Review a colleague's work: undergo second-expert review and ensure accuracy on first pass.

Skills

Bengali fluency

Character-level accuracy

Document annotation

Transcription

Reading order

Job description

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

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: Bengali, 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 Bengali 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 Bengali 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 Bengali 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 Bengali expert, and experienced annotators take on that review

Who You Are

• You are a native Bengali 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 Bengali-language material

• Script and encoding: Unicode normalization, Bengali 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 Bengali 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 Bengali documents rather than synthetic or templated pages

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