Fabrício Carraro and co‑authors released open‑weight machine‑translation models for Portuguese‑Nheengatu, the Amazonian Língua Geral spoken by 6‑10 k people. The models are trained on a new 14.5 k sentence parallel corpus that includes the 2023 Portuguese translation of Brazil’s Constitution. They also added a speech‑derived test set, which lifted the speech translation score by about 25 chrF++ points. The best Portuguese‑to‑Nheengatu system scores 31.7‑32.8 chrF++ on unseen constitutional articles.
Why it matters
The open models give speakers of Nheengatu a usable tool for legal and everyday communication in their language.
