Terms of Reference: Haitian Creole Language Lead

Terms of Reference: Haitian Creole Language Lead Translators without Borders
• Garden City, Idaho

Contract timeline:
March - August . The role is envisaged as an on-demand commitment during this period, with assignments provided according to project needs.

Hours:

As needed, approximately full working days per week, paid at USD per hour, with the exception of TWB Voice platform-based tasks, paid at USD per hour

Location:

This position is home-based. The ideal candidate is based in Haiti. Candidates in other locations are welcome to apply.

Travel:
None

Reporting to:
Community Engagement Lead

Final date to receive applications:
February, . Due to the urgency of this position, screening of candidates will begin immediately and this role will be filled as soon as a qualified candidate is identified

CLEAR Global is an equal-opportunity employer, committed to having a diverse team where individuals of all backgrounds collaborate and learn from one another. We believe we can be most effective with diverse experience and expertise in our team. We recruit on merit, actively seek diverse applicant pools and encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of disability, age, gender identity and expression, national origin, race and ethnicity, religious beliefs, marital or parental status, or sexual orientation, and welcome all types of diversity.

Speech technology holds significant promise for broad societal impact, and in improving access to information and services for marginalized populations, including those with limited literacy, digital access, and disabilities. However, current voice-enabled tools predominantly support a small number of globally dominant languages. High-performing speech systems rely on the availability of annotated voice data, which is scarce for the billion people who do not speak a “power language”.

To address this data gap at scale, CLEAR Global launched a voice data collection platform, “TWB Voice”, in December . TWB Voice functions to create and validate high-quality, diverse voice datasets in low-resource languages to support the development of speech technologies for social impact. In the platform, users can:

• Record their voice - either by reading a sentence aloud (read speech) or by answering a question (open-ended speech)
• Rate the voice recordings of others
• Rate the transcriptions of others

CLEAR Global is now working in partnership with two US–based universities to create hours of voice data in languages. The data will be relevant to crisis response settings. The voice data will be published openly to support research and language technology development for crisis settings.

Under this on-demand agreement, the Haitian Creole Language Lead will support specific tasks in line with CLEAR Global’s language data collection and validation needs, primarily for the TWB Voice platform, but potentially extending to related initiatives. Discrete tasks will be agreed upon case by case before the start of each assignment. The Haitian Creole Language Lead will work closely with CLEAR Global’s internal teams (Community Engagement Lead, NLP, and Project Management) and may collaborate with other stakeholders in the project.

Key activities may include:

In this context, a “corpus” means a collection of text samples in the target language which voice data contributors will either read aloud (read prompts) or questions which contributors will answer (spontaneous speech) to create the voice dataset.

• Identifying existing humanitarian-domain text and audio held by organizations that may be relevant to the project.
• Support corpus creation by ensuring text selections reflect the linguistic, cultural, and contextual characteristics of the target language.
• Review and approve text prompts for naturalness, inclusivity, and appropriateness to daily language use.
• Translate prompts from English to Haitian Creole.
• Provide feedback on orthography, dialectal variations, and language standardization.
• Support on quality assurance of voice data.

• Voice recording
• Recording rating
• Transcription
• Tr…