During the key selling period in the run-up to Christmas and the following Boxing Day and January sales, Amazon needed to translate into English the descriptions and features of approximately 16,000 products already available in Germany, making the products suitable for inclusion on the UK site. The high volume – a word count of over 2.5 million – was the reason why Amazon sought a machine translation approach for this project. The first challenge was the turnaround time: they needed the majority of the products completed and posted on the site within a three-week window. Second, the content was pulled from a variety of data sources, which presented a disparate mix of encoding and formatting challenges.

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