Rakuten, the largest E-Commerce player in Japan, has started a multilingual item search service in Rakuten Ichiba, the biggest Japanese online shopping mall.
Rakuten Ichiba top page[J] / Rakuten Ichiba top page[E]
The sales of Rakuten’s E-Commerce division for the year ’07 was 75.5 billion yen( about 800 million US dollars).
Rakuten launched E-Commerce service in Taiwan from May ’08 and now trying to sell more items for abroad. Multilingual search function is one of the service to increase the sales in overseas.
It’s using Google Translate to translate item pages into 24 languages. The user can search by his favourite language and searched keywords will match with the translated text written on item pages. This function is available at Rakuten International Shipping Services page.
Rakuten International Shipping Services
Search result by the keyword “Gundam” in English
Translated item page
[disclaimer] Hiroumi Mitani is working at Rakuten as a producer for international development.
Hiroumi Mitani