Dialingua — Bekwarra → English (browser build)
Quantised ONNX build of a Marian fine-tune for Bekwarra (ISO 639-3 bkv),
a Bendi language of Cross River State, Nigeria. Runs entirely in the browser
via Transformers.js — no server, no API key.
Base: Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-mul-en (Apache 2.0).
Size
| fp32 export | 926 MB |
| int8 quantised | 233 MB |
Quantisation targets the unmerged decoders. The merged decoder wraps its
whole body in a single ONNX If node, and ONNX Runtime's quantiser does not
descend into subgraphs — on that graph it silently compresses nothing.
Honest scope
Trained on 1,095 verse pairs OCR'd from printed Old Testament portions — below the ~3,000 where this stops being a demo.
- chrF++ 28.33 on a held-out book (Ruth).
- Scripture and formal register: works.
- Everyday speech: unreliable. It has never seen conversational Bekwarra.
For comparison, a 6× larger M2M-100 fine-tune on the same data scored 19.35. Smaller was better here, because 418M parameters against 1,095 examples is mostly unused capacity.
Do not rely on this for anything consequential without a native speaker checking the output.
Usage
import {{ pipeline }} from '@huggingface/transformers';
const translate = await pipeline('translation', 'Lordkiki/dialingua-bkv2eng-web');
const out = await translate("Ibang h'uni ang'a de achi i na k'ufo uni irichom?");
console.log(out[0].translation_text);
Orthography
Bekwarra's apostrophe is phonemic — a letter, not punctuation (k'uchu,
ng'amin, r'abe). Both the closed and spaced (K' iye) forms occur in
current writing; both survive this tokenizer, verified.
Training data
Old Testament portions in Bekwarra, OCR'd from scanned print. The underlying translations are © their rights holders; released here for research and language preservation. Settle permissions before commercial use.