The e-Commerce industry is becoming more and more competitive in the MENA region, with e-Commerce websites trying to provide customers with lower prices everyday; which means thinner margins everyday. this makes cost efficiency a critical factor in the success of an e-Commerce business. One of the costly processes of maintaining an e-Commerce website is publishing sold products information online. This process becomes even more complicated and costly when you need to provide multi-lingual information for your products to reach customers speaking different languages.
So How Do You Solve That Issue?
Manually translating the content for each product can be the solution when you are dealing with a small number of products, expensive items or when selling with high margins. but when you are talking about 30K+ unique SKUs varying in price, with thin margins then the Manual translation will severely hurt your bottom line.
So What About Machine Translation?
Machine translation can give you good results up to a certain extent, for example when it comes to brand names and product lines it fails miserably (ex. Hang Ten Ladies T-Shirts becomes "شنق عشرة نساء قمصان" or Nike Air Max Shoes becomes "أحذية نايك الجويه القصوى") which is totally not what you want your customers to see. But when it comes to descriptive sentences machine translation does a great job.
The Solution
So the solution needs to use the best of human translation and machine translation for it to work, what if you were able to have a replacement list for brand names and product lines that you would build cumulatively before you send it for machine translation, then "Hang Ten Ladies T-Shirts" will become "هانغ تن بلايز ستّاتيه" which makes much more sense.
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Machine Translation
There are many services available for machine translation from Google, Microsoft or even other specialized companies like translations.com, I found google to be best in terms of quality to cost. the cost is 20$ for each 1 million character, which is more than reasonable if you compare it to human translation. To Use Google translation API, you can use the link below:
https://cloud.google.com/console
for more information about pricing:
https://developers.google.com/translate/v2/pricing
Making Machine Translation More Cost Efficient (Translation Memory)
So even when you only pay 20$ for a 1 million character you might end up paying a lot when you want to translate 30K unique products information, so how to go around that difficulty. what if for each field you send for translation you keep the translated content in a local dictionary so next time this content is repeated you will get it from the local dictionary instead of sending it to google. This will save some money, and will allow you to refine translation to your liking for longer phrases. This is concept called Translation Memory, more about it in the link below:
http://blog.globalizationpartners.com/what-is-a-translation-memory-%28tm%29.aspx
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So Am I Supposed To Develop That Tool?
So after all of this ranting you might think, that this might sound good in theory, but it would need lots of time to build such a tool. Which cant be any further from the truth, I have developed a simple WPF application in a day that does just that, the source code is attached to this post you can use it and customize it the way you want, you can even ask me for help in using the application.
More Information About the Tool
This tool takes any excel sheet and translates columns you choose out of the excel sheet, and appends translated rows to the end of the excel sheet, it also saves (TranslationMemory) and (Replacement List) in a configurable location on your hard disk, you can access & edit that file using the same tool, all you have to do is configure your google API key and the location of the replacement file and translation Memory file.
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Please shares your comments, ideas and questions in the comments section below.DOWNLOAD THE APPLICATION SOURCE CODE HERE
Excel Translator WPF Application Source Code
DOWNLOAD THE APPLICATION INSTALLER HERE
Excel Translator Setup File
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