Brand Consistency for Multilingual E -commerce Machine Translation (2023)

Abstract: In the realm of e-commerce, it is crucial to ensure consistent localization of brand terms in product information translations. With the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape, new brands and their localized versions are consistently emerging. However, these diverse brand forms and aliases present a significant challenge in machine translation (MT). This study investigates MT brand consistency problem in multilingual e-commerce and proposes practical and sustainable solutions to maintain brand consistency in various scenarios within the e-commerce industry. Through experimentation and analysis of an English-Arabic MT system, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.

## introduction the brand consistency problem in machine translation is often viewed as a terminology enforcement issue. previous studies @xcite @xcite @xcite have proposed terminology constraint mechanisms to tackle this problem. however, these mechanisms assume a static terminology and fail to fully address the challenges encountered in an industry setting. in reality, the localized brand entries in the terminology bank are continuously expanding, being deleted, or undergoing edits, with different aliases taking distinct forms across language pairs. while brands from larger companies often have well-established localized forms, smaller brands frequently lack such localized versions for specific language pairs. as a result, there is a constant need for fixing or updating brand names in translations. addressing brand-related issues may require retraining or further fine-tuning of the production machine translation engine @xcite @xcite , however, the turnaround time to fix these issues can be unacceptable to users and may not align with the business requirements. to tackle these challenges, we first analyze the brand localization phenomena across various language pairs to simplify the mt brand-handling problem in multilingual e-commerce, then we propose a systematic framework to enforce brand consistency at scale in industrial e-commerce machine translation systems. furthermore, we provide experimental results showcasing the successful application of our proposed framework in an english-arabic machine translation setting. ## cross-lingual brand preservation and transformation to simplify the large-scale mt brand handling problem in e-commerce, we first propose to classify language pairs into two groups based on the major pattern of how brand terms need to be localized for a given language pair. these groups are brand preservation and brand transformation language pairs. brand preservation (bp) language pairs are language pairs where the brand terms from the source language typically remain unchanged in the target language. these language pairs often share similar writing systems, such as english and german. for example, brand term adidas has the same form in english and german. the majority of language pairs belong to this group in the context of e-commerce. brand transformation (bt) language pairs are language pairs where the brand terms in the source language need to be transformed into a different localized form in the target language. this is often the case for language pairs with different writing systems, such as english-arabic al'awadhi (2014), english-japanese, and german-greek. ## systematic mt brand consistency enforcement for e-commerce translation an overview of our proposed machine translation (mt) brand consistency enforcement framework is illustrated in figure 1 , the section 3.5 will discuss this framework in detail. the main components of the system are listed as following: although detailed discussions about the bmcache and tms are beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that in the context of e-commerce, brand terms can have multiple valid localized forms in different orthographic variations based on the target language. for instance, english brands can have multiple localized forms in arabic due to transliteration variations. similarly, in japanese, the complexity of the written systems (including romaji, kanji, hiragana, and katakana) @xcite can lead to multiple localized forms for an english brand, such as onitsuka (romaji) or オニツカ (katakana). to ensure consistency and standardization in brand mappings, a tms should establish quality assurance guidelines that guide translators to adhere to the localized brand forms available in the bmcache. once the localized brand forms are validated and accepted as the ground truth, they are stored in the bmcache and can be effectively utilized for communication with various stakeholders. ## experiment we experiment with english-arabic language pair using our proposed framework for brand consistency in machine translation because it has more language-specific complexities and challenges. ## related work previous approaches to terminology in machine translation are evaluated on translations in the generic domain @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite . other work related to lexical constrained machine translation have focused on general named entities and cross-lingual named entities mapping @xcite @xcite . however, brand handling in the e-commerce machine translation has received little attention in the literature. previous study @xcite presents various challenges of "non-standard" source language structure in e-commerce specific texts, they highlight the issue of brand names that are lexically ambiguous, and show that their e-commerce mt systems can manage to preserve brands for 90% of the translations. in the paper, we extend their description of other brand translation issues for e-commerce as presented in other brand handling studies for e-commerce translations focus on the effects of efficiently standardizing and brand localization @xcite al. (2020); jeong et al. (2019) on arabic benmamoun et al. (2016) ; @xcite and chinese e-commerce @xcite . ## conclusions this study examines brand localization in various language pairs and proposes language groups for brand preservation and transformation to simplify machine translation (mt) brand consistency problem. then we propose a systematic approach for mt brand consistency enforcement for product info texts translation. this approach consists of a universal brand handling logic as a framework and three mt brand handling solutions which can work independently or in combination to address most mt brand handling cases across language pairs in various e-commerce scenarios. the proposed approach is successfully applied in a case study of mt for english to arabic, with offline and online experiments showing improved effectiveness and customer experiences.