Datasets:

Pangeanic
/

Cantonese-English-Machine-Translation-Corpus-text

language:
  - yue
  - en
license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
  - translation
pretty_name: PangeanicYueEn - Cantonese English Parallel Corpus
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
tags:
  - cantonese
  - yue
  - english
  - machine-translation
  - parallel-corpus
  - bilingual
  - multilingual
  - llm
  - nlp
  - translation
  - alignment
  - instruction-tuning
  - rag
  - language-models
  - low-resource-language
  - chinese
  - traditional-chinese
  - ai-training-data
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: train.parquet

PangeanicYueEn - Cantonese English Parallel Corpus

PangeanicYueEn is a large-scale Cantonese-English parallel corpus designed for machine translation, multilingual large language model (LLM) training, cross-lingual NLP research, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), bilingual embeddings, instruction tuning, and multilingual AI systems.

This release contains 150,000 Cantonese-English sentence pairs sampled from a larger corpus of approximately 8.05 million parallel sentence pairs. For the complete dataset, please contact Pangeanic

The dataset focuses specifically on written Cantonese (Yue Chinese) paired with English translations, providing valuable training data for one of the most underrepresented Chinese language varieties in modern AI systems.

Why Cantonese Matters for AI

Most multilingual AI systems are heavily trained on:

English
Mandarin Chinese
Spanish
French
German

However, Cantonese (Yue Chinese) remains significantly underrepresented despite being spoken by tens of millions of people worldwide across:

Hong Kong
Macau
Guangdong
Southeast Asia
North America
Europe

As demand grows for multilingual AI, conversational assistants, translation systems, and regionally adapted LLMs, high-quality Cantonese datasets become increasingly important.

PangeanicYueEn helps address this gap by providing large-scale Cantonese-English parallel text suitable for modern AI development.

Dataset Overview

Attribute	Description
Language Pair	Cantonese (Yue) ↔ English
Dataset Type	Parallel Corpus
Modality	Text
Task	Machine Translation
Format	Parquet
Public Release Size	150,000 Sentence Pairs
Full Corpus Size	~8.05 Million Sentence Pairs
Script	Traditional Chinese
Domain	Mixed Web Content
Provider	Independent Dataset Release

Dataset Structure

The dataset contains two columns:

Column	Description
source	Cantonese sentence (Traditional Chinese)
target	English translation

Example:

source	target
培訓同教育都係必要嘅，以裝備人員掌握管理同運作新系統所需嘅技能。	Training and education are also necessary to equip personnel with the skills needed to manage and operate new systems effectively.
寫部落格係一個出色嘅兼職收入機會，因為佢讓你可以以自己嘅步伐同喺任何你選擇嘅地點工作。	Blogging presents an excellent opportunity for side income, as it allows you to work at your own pace and from any location you choose.
喺一個鄉村環境中，一名勞工同佢嘅配偶同孫子居住，反映出鄉村生活嘅簡樸。	In a rural setting, a laborer resided with his spouse and their grandchild, reflecting the simplicity of life in the countryside.

Example Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("Pangeanic/Cantonese-English-Machine-Translation-Corpus-text")

print(dataset["train"][0])

AI and LLM Use Cases

This dataset is suitable for:

Cantonese machine translation
English-Cantonese translation models
multilingual LLM training
continued pretraining
supervised fine-tuning (SFT)
retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
bilingual embedding models
cross-lingual retrieval
multilingual search systems
conversational AI
chatbot development
language model evaluation
synthetic data generation
multilingual instruction tuning
low-resource language research

Why This Dataset Is Useful

Large-Scale Cantonese Coverage

Cantonese remains one of the most underserved major languages in open AI training datasets.

This corpus provides substantial Cantonese-language coverage for researchers and developers working on multilingual AI systems.

Parallel Data for Translation

Aligned sentence pairs make the dataset suitable for:

neural machine translation
sequence-to-sequence models
encoder-decoder architectures
multilingual transformer training

LLM Adaptation

The dataset can be used for:

multilingual LLM adaptation
Cantonese language enhancement
bilingual alignment
continued pretraining
instruction tuning

Cross-Lingual Applications

Developers can use PangeanicYueEn for:

multilingual search
semantic retrieval
bilingual embeddings
knowledge transfer
multilingual RAG systems

Recommended Applications

Machine Translation

Train Cantonese ↔ English translation systems.

Multilingual Large Language Models

Improve Cantonese understanding and generation capabilities.

Conversational AI

Build Cantonese-capable assistants and chatbots.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Enhance retrieval performance for Cantonese and English content.

Cross-Lingual Retrieval

Develop semantic search systems that operate across languages.

Dataset Characteristics

Cantonese (Yue Chinese)
Traditional Chinese script
English translations
Sentence-level alignment
Large-scale bilingual data
AI-ready format
Suitable for modern NLP pipelines

Intended Research Areas

This dataset supports research in:

machine translation
multilingual NLP
low-resource languages
bilingual embeddings
cross-lingual transfer learning
language model adaptation
multilingual retrieval
multilingual RAG
conversational AI
Cantonese language technologies

Limitations

This release is a sample of a larger corpus.
The dataset does not include document-level metadata.
The dataset is provided at sentence level.
Domain distribution may vary across the corpus.

Users should evaluate suitability for their specific use cases and conduct additional filtering if required.

Citation

@dataset{pangeanic_cantonese_english_mt_2026,
  author = {{Pangeanic}},
  title = {Cantonese-English Machine Translation Corpus},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Pangeanic},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/Pangeanic/Cantonese-English-Machine-Translation-Corpus-text}
}

Keywords

Cantonese dataset, Yue dataset, Cantonese English corpus, Cantonese machine translation, bilingual dataset, parallel corpus, multilingual NLP, multilingual LLM, Cantonese AI, Chinese English translation, Cantonese chatbot dataset, Cantonese language model, machine translation corpus, bilingual AI training data, retrieval augmented generation, multilingual embeddings, low-resource language dataset, cross-lingual NLP, Cantonese NLP, Yue Chinese dataset.