The Macao Polytechnic Institute (MPI) has announced the unveiling of its electronic system for automatically recognising spoken Chinese and simultaneously giving an interpretation in Portuguese, and vice-versa.

The written announcement, issued on Wednesday, the day after the unveiling, quotes Lin Manlin, an assistant at the MPI Engineering Research Centre of Applied Technology on Machine Translation and Artificial Intelligence, as saying the system stores tens of millions of sentences in each language.

Ms Lin said the system could be used for simultaneous interpretation, transcription and immediate translation of the spoken word at various sorts of gathering, and for the teaching of the Chinese and Portuguese languages.

The institute hopes the system can help Macao and the adjacent Guangdong-Macao Intensive Cooperation Zone perform their function as places where China and the Portuguese-speaking world can do business.