With the availability of large amounts of multilingual documents, Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) has become an active research area in recent years. However, researchers often face with the problem of inherent ambiguities involved in natural languages. Moreover, this task is even more challenging for processing the Chinese language because word boundaries are not defined in the sentence. This paper presents a Chinese-Portuguese query translation for CLIR based on a Machine Translation (MT) system that parses Constraint Synchronous Grammar (CSG). Unlike traditional transfer-based MT architectures, this model only requires a set of CSG rules for modeling syntactic structures of two languages simultaneously to perform the translation. Moreover, CSG can be used to remove different levels of disambiguation as the parsing processes in order to generate a translation with quality. © 2007 IEEE.