Product Specialist, Localisation (1-year contract), EMTM Product & Tech

About Us

SPH Media’s mission is to be the trusted source of news and lifestyle content in Singapore and Asia.

One of our core purposes is to produce credible, balanced, and objective news and analysis, always with a view to uphold the public good and fostering an informed, engaged citizenry.

We welcome talented individuals to join us and grow a career in a vibrant and collaborative environment built around a culture of respect and inclusivity.

As an employer, we are committed to rewarding our people fairly and developing them in their careers.

About the Role

The Straits Times is scaling a translation feature that lets readers consume our journalism in Chinese. Improving it takes someone who can read the output like an editor and think about it like a product person.

This is an early-career product role, and an unusually direct way into product work. You bring the language judgement — native-level Chinese and a real feel for how Singapore news reads. You will work closely with the Senior Product Manager, who will work with you week to week, and you will be in the room for the decisions rather than downstream of them.

Expect to spend real time on the daily review queue. That work is not a chore on the side — it is where the signal comes from, and it is what will make you the person on the team who understands this product best.

What You Will Do

• Run the daily quality gate. Review flagged English-to-Chinese articles, resolve critical inaccuracies to ST’s editorial standard, and republish within turnaround targets. This is the product’s last mile and your main source of insight into how and where the system fails.
• Iterate on the AI. Analyse recurring error patterns from the daily queue and translate those insights into actionable prompt improvements. You will directly feed this data back into the AI models to fix translation flaws.
• Build the glossary. Develop and maintain a versioned glossary of Chinese terms, political titles and Singapore-specific idioms. It is not a style document — it feeds into how the system generates output, so accuracy is yours to guard.
• Report on feature performance. Track and report the quality metrics — pass rate, intervention rate, reader feedback, turnaround time — and flag movements that need attention.
• Support experiments and releases. Help the PM design comparisons of prompt variants, model versions and glossary updates against a fixed evaluation set. Run the scoring, write up what you found, and recommend whether it should ship.

What You Will Learn

You will learn to improve AI models by logging and analysing errors from daily translation tasks. You'll work within our sprint cycles to help refine the product, gaining practical experience in AI feedback loops and quality management, with the opportunity to deliver measurable improvements to a live consumer feature that impacts readers.

What We Are Looking For

• Native-level written Chinese and professional fluency in English, with a deep grasp of Singaporean current affairs and localised terminology — enough to make defensible calls on nuance, not just spot errors. This is the non-negotiable part.
• 1–3 years of full-time experience in translation, localisation, copyediting, journalism, content operations, or a product or operations role. Fresh graduates with strong relevant internships are welcome to apply.
• Ability to work at pace in a daily news environment, and comfort with ambiguity in a feature that is still taking shape.

Shortlisted candidates may be asked to complete a short exercise combining translation judgement with error analysis.