By Chris Lee

Electronics giant Sony has successfully piloted an automated review translation tool across eight of its European websites. The tool, created by social commerce company Reevoo, enables reviews from one country to be translated and used in other countries where the same product is sold.

Online reviews play an increasingly important role in the purchasing decision making of consumers, especially when it comes to electronic devices. According to a study by Lightspeed Research earlier this year, two thirds (64 per cent) of UK consumers read online product reviews before buying electronic equipment, while 38 per cent will look for reviews of the retailer they are considering buying from. Other consumers are the most trusted source of information, with 64 per cent viewing them as trustworthy and just eight per cent finding them “unreliable”.

Reevoo’s “ReevooMark” system used machine translation to supplement valuable and irreplaceable local language reviews, giving Sony a clear advantage of volume at launch, the company said. The near-instantaneous translation of reviews enables products to receive high volumes of reviews during the earliest part of their lifecycle, when products are at their most desirable and profitable, Reevoo added.

Nothing lost in translation

Sony has been using the ReevooMark service since the start of 2011 and is using the new translation tool on its German, Italian and Dutch sites, with Reevoo already providing tens of thousands of “additional” translated reviews.

“On average 78 per cent of Sony products across the eight countries benefit from reviews, with a maximum of 94 per cent - compared with a typical average for a similar business of below 20 per cent,” said Kyle McGinn, chief technology officer for Reevoo. “It’s impossible to overstate how important this is: the majority of products are most profitable in the first few weeks of sale, so brands like Sony need reviews quickly.”

Reevoo’s software employs Google Translate, a free translation service that provides instant translations between 57 different languages and can translate words, sentences and web pages between any of the supported languages. Using the Google Translate AJAX API, Reevoo’s developers created a tool that enables users to translate reviews into their native language.

McGinn concluded: “Just from a volume perspective, what we’re doing is only possible using machine translation, but equally significantly it maintains the integrity of each and every review. Human translation is necessarily subjective, and risks turning something from a real customer review into a piece of marketing collateral.”