Bye-bye Language Barrier — How IKEA Simplifies Multilanguage Communication


Track: Global Business | GB2 |
Wednesday, January 27, 2021, 10:30am – 11:00am
Held in: Stream 1
Presenters:
Anna Golubeva - Inter IKEA Systems B.V. 
Johan Sporre - IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)

IKEA has the vision ‘to create a better everyday life for the many people,’ through different customer meeting points around the world. To contribute to this, we needed to find better ways of communicating to the many people in the language they prefer, and to connect content creators/developers with linguists. New technologies have been explored and implemented, improvements have been made and coworkers have been involved on this journey. What started as an internal project two years ago, is now growing to a commodity in IKEA. In this session we will share what IKEA has achieved, learned, discovered, and what they are doing and plan to do in the future.

Takeaways: Attendees will learn how adaptive machine translation supports IKEA in connecting coworkers and customers; how continuous improvements are a must for machine and human translation; that speaking with coworkers around the world, we learn what we need to fix centrally; and how together we create workflows, enabling us to reach our customers in their preferred language faster.