The Macao Polytechnic Institute (MPI) and the Chinese Ministry of Education opened on Thursday their joint Engineering Research Centre of Applied Technology on Machine Translation and Artificial Intelligence, MPI says.

The institute issued a written statement quoting Chinese Vice-minister of Education Tian Xuejun as saying at the opening ceremony that the centre will help Macao perform its function as a place where China and the Portuguese-speaking world can do business.

The statement quotes Macao Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture Ao Ieong U as urging MPI to come up with more applications for translating Chinese into Portuguese and vice-versa.

Separately, the Portuguese news agency, Lusa, quotes an MPI Portuguese Language Pedagogical and Scientific Center coordinator, Gaspar Zhang, as saying the centre will draw on experience gained in voice recognition for translating Chinese, Portuguese and English into each other, and use it in devising similar translation methods for Italian and other languages spoken in parts of the world covered by the Chinese-led Belt and Road initiative.