Terms of Reference: Lingala Language Lead

Contract timeline: 1 March - 31 August 2026. The role is envisaged as an on‑demand commitment during this period, with assignments provided according to project needs.

Hours:

Services will be provided on an as‑needed basis, approximately 2 full working days per week. Compensation will be at a gross rate of USD 5 per hour for platform execution tasks and a gross rate of USD 10 per hour for Language Lead tasks.

Location:

This position is home‑based. The ideal candidate is based in DRC and speaks the variant of Lingala spoken in DRC.

Travel:
None

Reporting: to Community Engagement Lead

Final date to receive applications: 27 February, 2026

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 3.7 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 2024. TWB Voice has functionality 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:

CLEAR Global is now working in partnership with two US‑based universities to create 50 hours of voice data in 10 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 Lingala 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 Lingala 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 Lingala (DRC variant).
• Provide feedback on orthography, dialectal variations, and language standardization.
• Support on quality assurance of voice data.

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These tasks will be assigned according to a standard throughput rate estimation based on evidence collected with contributors in…