PDF Annotation & Transcription Experts – Malayalam

Location requirements Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States

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.

Who You Are
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 - We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.

Contract and Payment Terms
- You will be engaged as an independent contractor. - This is a fully remote role that can be completed on your own schedule. - Projects can be extended, shortened, or concluded early depending on needs and performance. - Your work at Mercor will not involve access to confidential or proprietary information from any employer, client, or institution. - Payments are weekly on Stripe or Wise based on services rendered. Please note: We are unable to support H1-B or STEM OPT candidates at this time.

About Mercor
Mercor partners with leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. You will work on projects that focus on training and enhancing AI systems. You will be paid competitively, collaborate with leading researchers, and help shape the next generation of AI systems in your area of expertise.