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LightInTheBox Goes French with Google Translate
BEIJING, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- LightInTheBox (http://www.LightInTheBox.com ) has officially launched its French site (http://www.LightInTheBox.com/fr ) with more than 40,000 product offerings, providing Francophones worldwide a great opportunity to access a wide variety of quality products, including Made-in-China cell phones, affordable customized wedding dresses, radio controlled toys, and obscure items like tattoo machines and cosplay costumes.
There are approximately 78 million native French speakers around the world, and the GDP per capita of France exceeded USD 34K in 2008. Any company wanting to serve a global customer base would never ignore this attractive group, yet it is never an easy task to translate 40,000 product descriptions into French all together. The secret weapon for such prompt translation is indeed “Google Translate”. Based on a free web service provided by Google called Google Translate, engineers at LightInTheBox developed a computer tool to facilitate the translation, ultimately shortening the estimated total labor cost from 36
man-months to less than only one-man month.
“This was an innovative yet bold decision to use machine translation for a mission-critical e-commerce site,” said co-founder Kevin Wen, who led the R&D effort, “in the beginning we were not sure about the accuracy of the translation, nor the full consequence of an error. But after extensive testing and review, we believe that while the translation quality is still far away from that of bilingual human translation, the result is in general, understandable and clear with only occasional human fixing required.”
LightInTheBox’s vision is “organizing world products for world customers”. It has committed to conquer many barriers preventing efficient flow of goods globally, including physical distance and language barriers. As a company less than two-years old, innovatively releasing a French version is a clear testimony of such a commitment. “This year, we plan to launch German and Spanish versions of our site with more to come,” said Li Wang, Director of Global Expansion at LightInTheBox. “We hope we can offer more languages than Amazon.com soon, which offers 5 languages so far.”
About LightInTheBox:
LightInTheBox is a leading global value-added online distributor. It has offered more than 50 thousand quality product selections to customers in more than 120 countries. It serves both individual consumers and commercial customers.
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