Machine Translation for Global E-Commerce on eBay

This paper describes the application of machine translation in overcoming language barriers for global e-commerce at eBay. We look at how buyers are provided the ability to perform cross-lingual search by translation of their search queries into the language of the listed items. We also show the process of translating item titles and descriptions from the inventory language into the user’s preferred language. We briefly discuss the role of translation in facilitating communication between buyers and sellers. In addition, we highlight the merits of evaluating translation quality together with system performance, which for search favors position-invariant metrics over more widely used translation metrics. Finally, we show how we incorporate user behavior and conversion metrics as part of our system evaluation methodology.