What the work involves

You listen to Bengali audio — conversational recordings, read speech, video clips, sometimes noisy or overlapping speakers — and produce a verbatim or lightly cleaned transcript according to a style guide the client supplies. A large share of the work is post-editing: machine-generated transcripts arrive partly correct, and your job is to catch misheard words, wrong homophone spellings, dropped particles, and mangled proper nouns. Beyond plain text, you may tag speaker turns, mark unintelligible spans, flag code-switching into English or Hindi, and apply labels defined in the project guidelines.

The guidelines matter more than instinct. Projects differ on whether to transcribe filler sounds, how to render numerals and dates, whether to normalise colloquial Dhakaiya or Kolkata forms to standard বাংলা orthography, and how to handle Sylheti, Chittagonian or Rarhi features. Expect the spec to change mid-project and expect to apply the change retroactively without being asked twice.

What the platform screens for

  • Genuine Bengali depth, not just fluency. Expect probes on যুক্তাক্ষর spelling, চলিত vs সাধু register, and whether you can place a speaker's region from their speech.
  • Guideline obedience under ambiguity. Screeners present cases where the spec doesn't cleanly cover what you heard and watch whether you invent a rule, pick the nearest documented one, or escalate.
  • Honest reporting of audio you cannot resolve. Guessing at inaudible speech is the single most damaging habit in transcription data.
  • Throughput realism. You should know roughly how many minutes of audio you can transcribe per hour at quality, and say so without inflating it.

Logistics

Fully remote, contractor engagement, asynchronous. Work arrives in batches with milestone deadlines rather than fixed shifts, so you can set your own hours — but batches can be time-sensitive and responsiveness to coordinator messages is part of the quality bar. You will need a quiet environment, reliable internet, good headphones, and comfort typing Bengali script quickly (Avro, Bijoy, or a system IME). Hourly pay in the $10–22 band is as observed on the platform and varies by task complexity and track record; it is not guaranteed.