The work

Each task begins with a publicly accessible Japanese PDF page that you source yourself within an assigned document type — a newspaper spread, an exam paper, a municipal notice, a restaurant menu, a handwritten form — and that contains at least one multimodal element. You then build a complete structural map of the page: every meaningful region bounded and typed (title, section heading, paragraph, list, table, figure, diagram, caption, formula, question, answer field), each given a reading-order index, and each child region linked to its parent figure or table. Then you transcribe every text region exactly as printed or written, including furigana, variant kanji forms and handwriting, flagging anything illegible rather than guessing.

The corpus deliberately targets what parsing and vision-language models fail on: vertical text, dense multi-column layouts, mixed-script pages, tables and handwriting. Nothing is model-generated — component identification, typing, reading order and transcription are all human-authored. Experienced annotators also take the review seat, checking a colleague's task end to end before it ships.

What the screen looks for

  • Native Japanese fluency, evidenced concretely: furigana handling, itaiji and variant forms, full-width versus half-width, ruby text in vertical settings.
  • Document-intensive professional history — interpretation, journalism, transcription, translation, editorial, typesetting or digitisation work — with examples you can describe.
  • Taxonomy discipline: whether you apply a fixed component vocabulary consistently across hundreds of pages, or drift and improvise per document.
  • Judgment on ambiguity: how you decide reading order in a mixed vertical/horizontal newspaper page, or whether a boxed sidebar is a figure, a table or a paragraph.

Logistics

Remote and asynchronous, task-based rather than shift-based. Eligibility is restricted to contributors based in Japan, South Korea, India, the United States, Canada or Western Europe. Accuracy is the first measure on this project, with handling time tracked alongside it — you will not be rewarded for speed at the cost of a wrong character. Volume varies with project phase; treat it as flexible contract work rather than guaranteed hours, and expect a paid or unpaid calibration task before steady work begins.