Pre-Editing and Computational Linguistic Assistant

Overview

Support the delivery of an Arabic/English final document version.

You have:

• High School diploma or equivalent is required.
• A Bachelor's degree in language, terminology, information management or language technology is desirable.
• Minimum of seven years of experience in language-related functions and computer-assisted translation is required.
• Strong background in syntax and morphology is required.
• Ability to solve problems in areas related to machine translation and document processing is required.
• Fluency in oral and written English and Arabic is required.
• Knowledge of French is desirable.

Result of Service The individual contractor will support in the delivery of an Arabic/English final version of a document, ensuring that the text is linguistically correct and conveys the meaning as clearly as possible.

Work Location UN-House ESCWA

Expected duration 3 Months

Duties and Responsibilities This position is located within the Conference Management Section (CMS), Resource Management and Service Development Division (RMSDD) of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). The Pre-Editing and Computational Linguistic Assistant will report to a senior Arabic Reviser.

The individual contractor will be responsible for the following tasks:

• Adjusts texts prior to running automatic translation in order to improve the raw quality of the machine translation output, by adapting the input text to be a closer match to the texts the engine is trained with and thereby helping the MT engine perform better;
• Ensures that the text is written with fixed rules, such as simplifying structures by using short sentences, avoiding complex or ambiguous syntactic structures and ensuring term consistency;
• Analyzes the content, sentence by sentence, to flag issues that will be problematic in translation; tags elements in the source text that are not to be translated;
• Screens documents and sales publications submitted for editing in order to ensure compliance with submission standards and regulations; provides author departments/divisions with specific instructions on correct format and submission procedures as necessary;
• Ensures queries conformity with United Nations editorial rules and style, and highlights to the attention of language staff complex or ambiguous syntactic structures and terms inconsistency;
• Runs automated tools for format checking and for terminology compliance of the source text against a project-specific glossary;
• Corrects and realigns the system misalignment of ESCWA indexed documents and publications in the portal that are automatically aligned, by: a) making the necessary changes to the bi-text segments in order to match the language source segment with the target language; b) removing unneeded information, such as punctuation marks, prepositions, numbers, and conjunctive words at the beginning of sentences to enable the system to extract the information properly; c) splitting long paragraphs and sentences into short neutral sentences; deleting empty cells to match the order of the sentences in both, source and target texts;
• Monitors ESCWA published material, selects relevant publications and extracts technical terms, titles and terminology lists;
• Identifies and continuously updates the terminology database with verified corporate names, other titles and subject terms for consideration by senior staff member;
• Assists in responding to terminology queries from ESCWA staff members, United Nations Secretariat and agencies, governmental and non-governmental bodies, and other outside bodies;
• Collaborates to the maintenance of the Section's reference collection of UN documents, publications and other reference materials;

• Covers other support functions when colleagues are absent.

  Qualifications/special skills High School diploma or equivalent is required. A Bachelor's degree in language, terminology, information management or language technology in combination with qualifying training in web writing and publishing is desirable.

All candidates must submit a copy of the seven year experience in a language-related function, the required educational degree. Incomplete applications will not be reviewed. A minimum of seven years of experience in language related functions and computer assisted translation including strong background in syntax and morphology; good understanding of programming and linguistics; ability to solve problems in areas related to machine translation, grammar and style checking, document processing and information retrieval, and Computer-Assisted Language Learning is required.

Languages English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat; and Arabic is a working language of ESCWA.

For the position advertised, fluency in oral and written English and Arabic is required. Knowledge of French is desirable.

Note: “Fluency” equals a rating of ‘fluent’ in all four areas (speak, read, write, and understand) and “Knowledge of” equals a rating of ‘confident’ in two of the four areas.

No Fee THE UNITED NATIONS DOES NOT CHARGE A FEE AT ANY STAGE OF THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS (APPLICATION, INTERVIEW MEETING, PROCESSING, OR TRAINING). THE UNITED NATIONS DOES NOT CONCERN ITSELF WITH INFORMATION ON APPLICANTS’ BANK ACCOUNTS.

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Added 3 years ago - Updated 1 year ago - Source: careers.un.org