nazarioz/changana-pt-parallel

---
language:
- pt
- ts
license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
- translation
tags:
- changana
- ronga
- xitsonga
- bantu
- low-resource
- bible
- parallel-corpus
- mozambique
pretty_name: Portuguese-Changana Parallel Corpus
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
---

# Portuguese–Changana Parallel Corpus

## Description

The first publicly available sentence-level parallel corpus
for Portuguese and Changana (Xichangana/Ronga), a Bantu language
spoken by approximately 3–5 million people in southern Mozambique,
South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

## Source

The corpus was constructed by aligning two Bible translations
at the verse level:

- **Portuguese:** Almeida Corrigida Fiel (ACF), published by
Sociedade Bíblica Trinitária do Brasil.
- **Changana:** Bibele hi Xizronga xa Namunhla (BRN), published
in 2021 by Dumbeka Editores e Consultores
([brn.xizronga.org](https://brn.xizronga.org)).

The corpus covers the 27 books of the New Testament.

## Statistics

| Statistic | Portuguese | Changana |
|-----------|-----------|----------|
| Aligned pairs | 7,929 | 7,929 |
| Mean sentence length (tokens) | 20.0 | 18.4 |
| Vocabulary size | 18,715 | 25,727 |
| CG/PT length ratio | 0.92 | 0.92 |

## Splits

| Split | Pairs |
|-------|-------|
| Train | 6,343 |
| Dev | 793 |
| Test | 793 |

Splits created with random shuffle (seed=42).

## Languages

- **Portuguese (pt):** Brazilian Portuguese, formal biblical register.
- **Changana (ts):** Also known as Xichangana, Xangana, or Ronga.
Bantu language (Niger-Congo family). ISO 639-1: ts (Tsonga cluster).

## Limitations

- Single domain (religious text)
- Formal/archaic register, not conversational
- Small size (7,929 pairs) by modern MT standards

## Usage

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("nazarioz/changana-pt-parallel")

# Access a training example
example = dataset["train"][0]
print(f"PT: {example['text_pt']}")
print(f"CG: {example['text_cg']}")
```

## Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

```bibtex
@misc{changana-pt-parallel-2026,
title={Portuguese--Changana Parallel Corpus},
author={Nazario},
year={2026},
url={https://huggingface.co/datasets/nazarioz/changana-pt-parallel}
}
```

## License

CC-BY-4.0