In keeping with the rising trend of livestreaming in eCommerce, AliExpress, a global retail marketplace under the Alibaba Group, has unveiled a real-time livestreaming translation feature on its eCommerce platform.
The technology launches in time for participating merchants and live streamers to achieve success in the 2020 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, the company says.
Currently, the new feature supports simultaneous translation from Chinese to English, Russian, Spanish and French, as well as from English to Russian, Spanish and French.
“As an industry pioneer, we are dedicated to empowering both content creators and sellers to react fast and to break language barriers by taking advantage of cross-border livestreaming, a testament of our commitment to technological innovation,” said Wang Mingqiang, the general manager of AliExpress.
As a leading cross-border eCommerce platform that is active in over 200 countries and regions, language barrier is a “formidable obstacle” for SME merchants looking to expand their target audience internationally, the company says.
AliExpress currently supports content translation in 18 languages. However, cross-border livestreaming poses “new challenges” for real-time translations, the company says. These include accents and mispronunciations. In addition, the translation system needs to keep up with the ever-changing usages in language such as colloquialism, internet acronyms, slangs and technical jargons.
To tackle the challenges, Alibaba DAMO Academy’s speech models reduce the inaudibility in noisy livestreaming environment and are able to understand accented speech. The system can recognise that users are communicating in different languages, and automatically prompt them to turn on the real-time translation feature.
The translation system is powered by Alibaba’s AI technology, which won First Place in five competitions at the 2018 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT18), the Olympics of machine translation.
Currently, 65 per cent of AliExpress merchants leverage the platform’s real-time translation capability. During AliExpress’s 828 Mid-Year Sale last August, 90 per cent of merchants have used real-time translation during their livestreaming sessions, the company reports.
The feature also has substantially boosted merchants’ sales as a result of enhanced livestreaming sessions since its introduction in May. The average conversion rate of livestreaming sessions with real-time translation is 300 per cent higher than livestreaming sessions without, the company says.
AliExpress will upgrade the system in phases to support more languages and offer greater functionality.
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