On eBay Russia, the company is also applying machine translation to search queries. In the past, users who searched in English, for example, would turn up better results from items listed in English.

So instead, eBay has been developing its own translation tools that can identify things that are more likely to appear on a marketplace like theirs, where there’s no inventory catalog to refer to.

Since eBay added artificial intelligence translations for product listings in 2014, sales from the US to Spanish-speaking Latin American nations increased by almost 11 percent, according to a study.