Phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) is considered as state-of-the-art MT approach whenever sufficiently large parallel (or comparable) datasets for training are available.
for many language pairs and translation directions (English to Portuguese among them) large training datasets only exists for few domains, such as parliamentary discussions (Europarl (Koehn, 2005)) or legal documents (JRC-Acquis corpus (Steinberger et al., 2006)).