In 2013, eBay announced a big focus on growth in emerging markets for its marketplace, in particular, Russia, Brazil and China. Some of this growth can be enabled through localization, but the marketplace has tested a more technical approach — with machine translation — with its first big expansion effort in Russia.

To spearhead these efforts, eBay brought on machine translation expert Hassan Sawaf, a data scientist whose career spans more than 20 years in speech recognition and human translation technologies. He’s also the patent holder on hybrid machine translation, a system and method for using machine translation to translate from one language into another.

As Sawaf explains to us, language translation can be a source of friction between buyers and sellers on eBay, and his goal was to go beyond word-for-word translation into what he calls context translation. This means that Sawaf is helping build engines that ‘learn’ from context of the data (like item descriptions) rather than just more standard word-by-word translations. More.

See: TechCrunch

See also: Podcast: interview with Hassan Sawaf, Chief Scientist for SAIC Linguistics, on Machine Translation and the future of human translators in the Translator T.O.

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