eBay has acquired machine translation technology from Virginia-based company AppTek in further efforts to expand its international presence.

The company is acquiring both talent and IP for machine translation from AppTek, although a separate division focused on voice technology will continue, possibly still under the AppTek brand.

The full terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but reportedly eight people from AppTeks 10-person team will be joining eBay, including one of the co-founders. eBay will continue to serve AppTeks existing customers, largely made up of government contractors, by licensing the technology.

The acquisition of AppTek provides eBay with a number of the worlds experts in hyper machine translation technology, as well as coding that it can integrate into existing eBay solutions and a wealth of data on language.

“If you do machine learning, you need to have a lot of data to train your algorithm,” said Marc Delingat, senior director of product and technology for geographic expansion and cross border trade at eBay. “They have that for all the languages that we were looking for, to over the key trade corridors that we were looking at.”

eBay began working on its own machine translation technology two years ago. Today, 20 per cent of its sales involve cross-border trade, which is growing faster than its domestic business, but it faces several barriers in translating listing details due to its specific, commerce-related needs, for example descriptions that arent written in complete sentences or with proper grammar.