PDF Annotation & Transcription Experts – Malayalam

Mercor; United States; Remote; USD 21,000 - 34,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is seeking a native Malayalam speaker for precise document annotation and transcription tasks. You will label page regions, ensure reading order, and transcribe Malayalam script with character-level accuracy.

This role emphasizes attention to detail and consistency across complex layouts, multi-column text, and handwritten content. The project focuses on creating training data for Malayalam and other Indic scripts; you will review work and adhere to strict quality standards, with remote

Qualifications

• Native Malayalam speaker with full command of Malayalam script and orthography.
• Experience with document annotation, transcription, localization, proofreading or related language data tasks.
• Character-level accuracy is essential; diacritics must be correct.
• Apply a consistent taxonomy across hundreds of pages.
• Comfortable with multi-column layouts, handwritten forms, and diverse document types.

Responsibilities

• Open and check a task: pages are provided, PDFs uploaded for you; confirm Malayalam content and legibility.
• Annotate structure: identify and bound every meaningful region and assign component type and reading order.
• Record relationships: link each region to its parent figure or table.
• Transcribe faithfully: reproduce text exactly in Malayalam script, noting illegible regions.
• Capture page metadata: language, type, source, dimensions, and presence of tables, formulas or handwriting.
• Review a colleague's work: second Malayalam expert reviews the task end-to-end.

Skills

Malayalam fluency

Script mastery

Transcription

Job description

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

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

• Open and check a task: pages are provided, so you do not source documents yourself. We find the PDFs and upload them for you. Before annotating, confirm the page is in Malayalam, is legible, has real content, and shows no personal details.
• 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.
• Unsuitable pages are flagged up front rather than after thirty minutes of work.

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.