Job Description

Location: Khanjanpur, Near Santiniketan, West Bengal

The Santali component of the project

Suchana has been tasked with data collection for the Santali language component of this project.

This will include collection of written text in Santali using Ol Chiki script; translation of 100000 sentences from Bengali and/ or English into Santali using Ol Chiki; collection of speech data from Santali mother tongue speakers in different districts in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha and Assam; and the collection of photos of signboards / posters etc.

Applications are invited for the temporary post of “Senior Annotator and language expert in Santali Language.”

The candidate will be supporting the Natural language processing (NLP) program of AI4Bharat Centre, IIT Madras as a Santali Language expert. The position entails guiding a small team (10-15 people) in translation and transcription work in Santali. The proposed candidate would be a language expert in Santali and Bengali with significant academic expertise and work experience in handling language tasks in both these languages such as Translation, Transcription, and Annotation. Experience in leading small teams and guiding them to meet project commitments would be an advantage.

For the translation components of the project Bengali is the source language and Santali is the destination language. The Senior Annotator will review the Santali translator team’s output and sign off on it from the Santali language perspective, and give guidance to the team on complex translation issues.

For the speech data component, the Senior annotator will support the transcription of the Santali speech data corpus to be collected by the team of Suchana.

The contract for the position will be with IIT Madras. Work will be managed by the AI4Bharat team in collaboration with the Suchana leadership team.

Job Location: Birbhum, West Bengal

Job Type: Flexible, Work at Suchana or from home, with periodic visits to Suchana, to be arranged.

Salary Range: Around INR 30K (Negotiable as per qualification and experience)

Duration: 1 Year.

• The appointed candidate will need to visit the office as per the work requirement.

• If working from home, they are expected to have their own Laptops/Desktops.

Qualification, Skils & Experience:

Essential:

1. Excellent high-level language fluency in Santali and Bengali.

2. Excellent fluency in writing in Santali using Ol Chiki script.

3. Excellent typing skills in Ol Chiki and good computer literacy; willingness to learn new platforms.

4. Familiarity with Santali’s history and culture.

5. Familiarity with concepts of linguistics and translation.

Preferred:

6. PhD in Santali / Ph.D. in linguistics

7. Proven writing ability in Santali and/or Bengali with academic publications or published creative writing or journalism.

8. Good experience doing written translation from Bengali (or English) to Santali using Ol Chiki script.

9. Work experience in the use of digital tools in translation and transcription.

Applications:

Please send a CV with a cover email explaining how your qualifications and experience match our requirements to suchana.india@gmail.com and milward.bose@gmail.com by Monday July 4th 2022.

PLEASE PUT “POSITION: SENIOR ANNOTATOR” in the subject line.

Shortlisted applicants will be called for remote interview on Thursday July 7th 2022.

Eligibility Criteria

Not Specified

Desired Candidate Profile

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Not Specified

Organization Details

• Organization Name:Suchana Uttor Chandipur Community Society
• About Organization:We are a community organisation working since 2004 on rural poverty, focusing on education with the most excluded people: adivasi indigenous people and scheduled castes. We run a full-time children’s Education Resource Centre which runs a number of programmes and is also a drop-in centre where children come to play and learn. We also run Learning Centres in 6 other remote locations across Birbhum district, and a mobile library taking books to 25 villages.
  
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