We hear that the team is tackling Spanish and Portuguese, focusing on Brazil and Latin America. Now that Sawaf has this scalable infrastructure in place, the team will be expanding this to other languages in emerging markets. It’s unclear how this has translated into an increase sales and transactions in the marketplace, which is the ultimate goal. And twice the amount of users in Russia are inputting search queries in their native language. Sawaf says that the search technology, which just launched a month ago, returns signficantly more results for Russian eBay users. Sawaf’s technology takes it one step further, and will determine that a ‘purse’ in an item description, also refers to ‘bag,’ or ‘item,’ or ‘piece,’ providing a more accurate representation of the item in the Russian language. ![]() “Machine translation normalizes this,” says Sawaf.įor the past year, Sawaf and his team of 14-15 data scientists and engineers have built a technology that allows Russian users to search in Russian, but be able to return queries with English listings that match. In order to access English listings, which do represent a considerable number of the listings on eBay’s platform, Sawaf explains, the Russian user would have to input the query on eBay in English. But the Russian user’s query will not be able to see posts that match their query that were written by sellers listing in English. When they are inputting search terms in Russian, this engine will produce search results of listings that match the query in Russian. A Russian user can go to the localized version of eBay and see all products that are listed in Russian. eBay is trying to curate inventory from a global base of sellers and surface this to buyers in emerging eBay markets based on what ships to them in their respective countries. Here’s the current problem eBay faces in emerging countries like Russia. 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. ![]() 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.Īs 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. 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. 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. In 2013, eBay announced a big focus on growth in emerging markets for its marketplace, in particular, Russia, Brazil and China.
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