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PDF Annotation & Transcription Experts - Japanese

Canada
Remote
Posted Sep 18, 2026
1 position

US$34 / hour

Opens an external site

Employment type: Contract
Experience level: Mid-level · 2+ years
Posting language: English
Working hours: 40 hours per week
Location requirements: Country, Canada

Job summary

Annotate the structure of Japanese documents by identifying and bounding regions such as titles, tables, and diagrams while establishing reading order. Perform faithful transcriptions of all text, including handwritten content, and link components to their respective figures or tables.

Job details

This role is for one of our clients Compensation: $33.58 per hour Fluent Language Skills Required: Japanese. Native fluency in Japanese, including full command of kanji, hiragana and katakana, is required for this position. All annotation and transcription work is performed in Japanese. 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: Japanese, alongside Korean and five Indic scripts. 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, vertical text, 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 Japanese 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 Japanese, 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, including kanji, hiragana, katakana, furigana and 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 Japanese expert, and experienced annotators take on that review Who You Are You are a native Japanese speaker with full command of kanji, hiragana and katakana, including furigana and variant character forms You have professional experience in interpretation, journalism, transcription, translation, editorial work, or comparable document-intensive work You are exact: character-level accuracy matters more here than speed, and a single wrong character 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: vertical text, multi-column newspapers, exam papers, handwritten forms Nice-to-Have Specialties AI training 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 Japanese-language material Script and encoding: Unicode normalization, Japanese input methods, full-width and half-width forms, and kanji variant handling 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 vertical text and multi-column layouts Transcriptions match the source character for character, in Japanese script rather than romaji Your tasks pass second-expert review the first time Unsuitable pages are flagged up front rather than after thirty minutes of work

What you’ll do

Requirements

Candidates must be native Japanese speakers with full command of kanji, hiragana, and katakana, including variant forms. Professional experience in fields like translation, journalism, or editorial work is required to ensure high character-level accuracy.