Language Specialist | Japanese

As a Japanese linguist, you'll work at the intersection of Research and Product—shaping how our technology understands and produces language, one nuanced decision at a time. You'll test features before they launch, dig into ambiguous or complex language data, and turn linguistic complexity and industry know-how into insights that stakeholders across the company can act on.

What you'll do

• Serve as a linguistic consultant for your language across the company, interacting with a wide range of stakeholders from Research to Product to Sales and beyond and helping to develop products and features that redefine work in the language industry
• Test and evaluate DeepL's products and their features both before and after launch
• Assess the linguistic quality of data generated by both humans and machines
• Design tests and examples to help DeepL identify the right freelancers for linguistic projects
• Evaluate work done by freelance linguists and provide them with actionable feedback based on project needs and expectations
• Investigate and evaluate language complaints submitted by users and offer your linguistic analysis
• Partner with stakeholders on experiment and evaluation design, bringing linguistic and user-expectation reasoning to help inform what to test, what to validate, and how to measure it
• Explain linguistic phenomena to a wide range of target audiences, from those with little to no linguistic expertise to fellow linguists

What you'll need

• Deep familiarity with the cultural and professional context where the language is natively spoken, typically gained through education or substantial working experience in Japan, ideally native-level speaker of Japanese
• English fluency (C1+)
• Bachelor's degree in linguistics, translation, foreign languages, language teaching, or a related field
• At least 2 years of experience working in translation, localization, linguistics, education, or a related field
• Demonstrated ability to break down complex linguistic matters in a way that anyone can understand, including non-speakers of that language
• Deep knowledge of and familiarity with reputable linguistic resources for Japanese
• Expert understanding of research best practices
• Experience working with machine translation and identifying error patterns common to machine output

Nice to have

• Experience with AI prompting or a basic understanding of LLMs, NLP, AI or experience in AI-led workflows

What they offer

• Diverse and internationally distributed team with people of more than 90 nationalities
• Hybrid work schedule with flexible hours, team members coming into the office twice a week
• Virtual Shares linking your contribution directly to DeepL's growth
• Regular in-person team events and monthly Hack Fridays
• Open communication with regular feedback and direct collaboration