As I struggle to master the many curious foibles of the Czech language I’m embarked upon a losing race against the indelible march of AI-based translation tools that will almost certainly master it before I do.

Aside from the practical benefits of this, a recent study from Washington University in St. Louis highlights the benefits this capability brings to global trade.  The researchers crawled through data from auction site eBay and found that even small improvements in the quality of translation available to consumers correlated with a 10.9% boost to trade between countries on the platform.

Trade between users in the United States and countries for whom English is not native both before and after eBay introduced an AI-driven machine translation service around 2014.  The researchers believe that this new functionality helped to improve the quality of translation available on the site by around 10%.

Reducing distance

Distance is historically a major barrier to trade, with a clear relationship between the distance between both parties and their willingness to trade with one another.  The data suggests that the machine translation tool helped to effectively reduce the apparent distance by making it less of a factor in trade decisions.

The team attempted to mitigate external factors that could have influenced the amount of global trade conducted by focusing on the length of the product title.  It sounds a peculiar method, but they reason that the act of translating longer titles takes more work, but that the payoff from this work can also be higher.  If eBay simply increased their marketing budget, you would expect to see similar results for both long and short product titles (whether that’s true is open to debate of course).

“These comparisons suggest that the trade-hindering effect of language barriers is of first-order importance,” the authors say. “Improved machine translation has made the eBay world significantly more connected.”

The pace of change in machine translation is rapid, and so these improvements are growing considerably, with the relatively short period since the research was conducted already witness to significant growth in the technological capabilities of machine translation today.  Therefore the potential impact on cross-border trade could be even more pronounced today.

It represents a relatively clear experiment whereby results can be measured, but it’s something that is only beginning to be felt across sectors.  The authors are confident that the impact they’ve seen at eBay can be replicated elsewhere however.