Walmart is celebrating the continued expansion of its translation services, which combine artificial intelligence with human expertise to improve how non-English speakers search and shop online.
This week, the retailer announced major upgrades to its Walmart Translation Platform (WTP). Since its launch in 2022, Walmart said that more recent developments had contributed to a shopping experience that was “seamless, accurate, and inclusive for customers worldwide.”
Why It Matters
Walmart noted that integrating AI has allowed it to smooth over contextual variations and mistranslations owing to dialect, regional vocabularies and slang, which can often lead to frustration for those shopping online.
With over 10,000 stores located across 19 countries, the development of Walmart’s online translation services stands to benefit an increasingly international user base, improving accessibility for non-English and multilingual shoppers in both the U.S. and abroad.
What To Know
Walmart’s translation platform began with Spanish searches in 2022 and, since then, has been “systematically naturalizing search for non-English-users across our entire catalog.”
The latest iteration of the WTP employs a blend of AI—for scale and speed—as well as human linguists and localization experts to refine translations.
Walmart notes that literal translations of certain words and products can yield awkward results and frustrate shoppers—such as Liberte Yogurt becoming “freedom yogurt” for a French customer, or Hot Wheels toy cars turning into “very warm wheels” to Spanish speakers.
“Every one of these instances was flagged by an AI agent, raised to a linguist and re-translated properly,” Walmart explains. “Then, the linguist worked with data science and computer engineering teams to instruct Walmart’s in-house AI how to stop it from happening again.”
“The WTP understands every one of these nuances and maps the variations back to the same entry, so customers find what they’re looking for—no matter where they’re searching from,” it added.
By doing so, Walmart said this has made its online shopping experience more inclusive, helping non-English users find what they want more easily.
What People Are Saying
Walmart, in its announcement, said: “The Walmart Translation Platform (WTP) got its start with Spanish search in 2022 and since then, has been systematically naturalizing search for non-English-users across our entire catalog. It’s a gargantuan task. But led by people, and powered by AI, it’s changing the game one word at a time.”
Tim Simmons, senior vice president and chief product officer at Walmart International, said: “The Walmart Translation Platform is an incredible piece of technology, and it’s also got the benefit of being highly efficient. Beyond the efficiencies we’ve gained employing agentic AI, we’re creating a better overall experience with the focus on cultural adaptation throughout the whole tech-stack.”
What Happens Next?
On a business level, Walmart said that the platform had delivered significant cost savings. The latest version of the WTP runs at around one percent of the cost of its previous translation system, and Walmart projects that it will save the company more than $20 million annually.