Marks & Spencer speaks the customer’s language – online

A British retail giant is streamlining the localization of its e-commerce site with automated translation.

Marks & Spencer (M&S) is deploying the TransPerfect GlobalLink solution to manage its multilingual content and automate key processes in the translation workflow for its website. The retailer also plans to automate future publishing of its web and email content with GlobalLink.

In one example of how M&S is leveraging the solution, using a mix of linguists and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered machine translation, TransPerfect was able to streamline the translation of 620,000 words of M&S website copy from English into Arabic. GlobalLink technology allowed M&S to decrease its overall time-to-market by half. In addition, the combination of translation memory and TransPerfect's AI productivity tools has enabled M&S to realize a 54% total savings on translation spend.

M&S has also been able to seamlessly integrate GlobalLink into already-installed technology platforms including Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Stibo Mediator.

"After evaluating multiple vendors, we chose to partner with TransPerfect to build our localized Arabic site,” said Rachael Stewart of M&S international business development. This initiative has made M&S accessible to many more customers."

M&S is a major British multinational retailer that specializes in selling clothing, home goods, and food products. Headquartered in London, M&S currently operates 959 stores across the U.K.