The Only Secondhand Bookstore

Mandarake Corporation, which develops eleven retailing stores and E-commerce websites nationwide dealing with products for collectors. It is famous for its variety of goods including goods for experts and its high-quality selling service, and some enthusiasts also claim that there must be nothing that Mandarake does not have. In recent years, Mandarake increasingly gathers the attention from overseas, and cross-border ECs and voluntarily hosted online auctions become popular instantly.

More than 2,000 Product Translations Daily

Following the trend of “Cool Japan”, the number of foreign users visiting Mandarake’s sites is increasing day by day.

While overlooking rapidly increasing foreign users leads to the loss of opportunities to obtain a huge profit, it is hard to find a suitable translation solution to ameliorate this kind of situation. This is because machine translation does not generate sufficiently accurate translations for the enormous variations in commodities managed by Mandarake. Additionally, it is extremely costly to request orders from professional translators for over 2000 newly added commodities everyday.

Want to Reduce Cost and Time for Cross-border EC Multilingualization

“We have been selling products to overseas customers on our e-commerce website for around 15 years. We initially released English version, and then extended other support languages such as French, etc. However as the number of products increased, the time and cost of translation increased intensively; consequently, it became impossible to translate all the product information in all languages. As a result, only the title of the product was translated into English, but the contents were still in Japanese. Although the overseas needs of Japanese animation goods and comics are rising, it becomes necessary to translate product information in several languages. This became our prime challenge of how to multilingualize without spending time and cost.”

“Machine + Human” for Speedy Translation”

“Machine + Human” for Speedy Translation”
The system that processes sending commodity information added/updated everyday to YarakuZen translation engine customized to Mandarake and sending back translation results by machine translation to Mandarake’s sites has been constructed via YarakuZen translation API.
If several employees who are fluent in foreign languages go through the results of machine translation during their free time, it will bring the following 3 benefits.
(1) Faster reflection of newly added product information on multilingual sites
(2) Balance between the translation quality and the cost gained by combining Machine and Human translation
(3) Improvement in translation quality from accumulating translation results as phrases

Operating Cost & Security are our Determinants

“In order to write articles that appeal to native customers in a short time, we first tried Machine Translation such as Google Translate and Weblio, but translation accuracy was not high. Therefore, we participated the exhibition of translation services, but there was no translation service targeting at proper nouns on anime and characters. For example, even the name “Tezuka Osamu ” was not properly reflected in machine translation. After that, we found YarakuZen. YarakuZens machine translation has the self-learning function by registering phrases and terms by users, so we decided to introduce it. Despite the flexibility of coping with functional customization for our EC website, the operating cost is low compared with other services. Moreover, it is easy to use. Since we manage customer information, YarakuZen is considered as the best service in consideration of security. “

Overseas Revenue Rises from 15% to 40%

“Our translation team is using Company Plan of YarakuZen, but since the performance of machine translation is quite satisfying, employees other than the translation team sometimes use it as well. As the number of YarakuZen users increases, the efficiency of translation work progresses more rapidly. Thus, after introducing YarakuZen, overseas total revenue ratio rose to 40% while it was 15% before. The effect that searching results are shown in local language directly leads to the upward increase on purchasing rate. The product information displayed in the online auction held six times a year is also translated by YarakuZen, and there is a great evaluation from home and abroad every round. “

YarakuZen applied for Customer Support

“In the past 5-6 years, orders in Southeast Asia have been increasing corresponding to the needs in Europe and the United States. Especially in Thailand, the number of orders in one month sometimes exceeds USs. Afterwards, we plan to extend more support languages of our e-commerce website. In addition, since it is quite surprising that Chinese customers tend to have some refusals to English website, we try to heighten the accuracy by utilizing the self-learning function of accelerated machine translation. Currently, multilingual customer support is generally implemented at each store, but we plan to simplify it by registering the standard phrases of inquiries. Meanwhile, we also want to accumulate data such as customer information and to accomplish CRM that does not stress overseas customers. “