eBay Acquires Machine Translation Technology from AppTek

Press Release

AppTek Profile

  • AppTek was founded in 1990 and has offices in McLean, Virginia an Aachen, Germany.
  • The company provides Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), Machine Translation (MT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) software tools and services to commercial and the U.S. Government clients.
  • The company’s patent-pending Hybrid Machine Translation engine is a leading-edge breakthrough in language translation technology, using rule-based and statistical-based engines that improve efficiency and accuracy

eBay profile

  • eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) operates commerce platforms that connect various buyers and sellers worldwide.

Transaction Notes

  • Global expansion is a key priority for eBay, both to connect consumers with the things they need and love, and to enable businesses to reach new consumers in new markets around the world.
  • Given that 20% of eBay’s transactions are cross-border, and that one of every three new users to eBay comes through a cross-border transaction, eBay had to bridge meaningful language gaps, both online and on mobile.
  • To do that, the company needed to solve a unique challenge: provide accurate multi-language translation across a large number of language pairs that encompass more than 650 million individual listings globally.
  • AppTek’s proprietary machine translation technology will allow eBay to improve its current machine translation efforts, and to advance its new translation capabilities more quickly.