eWorld Translations

Portuguese (português or língua portuguesa) is one of the world’s major languages, ranked seventh according to number of native speakers (between 205 and 230 million). It is the language of about half of South America’s population, even though Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas. It is also a major lingua franca in Portugal’s former colonial possessions in Africa. It is an official language in nine countries (see the table on the right), also being co-official with Cantonese Chinese in Macau and Tetum in East Timor.

excerpted from Wikipedia

Portuguese spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th centuries as Portugal established a colonial and commercial empire (1415–1999) which spanned from Brazil in the Americas to Goa and other parts of India, Macau in China and Timor (north of Australia). It was used as the exclusive lingua franca on the island of Sri Lanka for almost 350 years. During that time, many creole languages based on Portuguese also appeared around the world, especially in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Today, Portuguese is the official language of Angola, Brazil (190.6 million), Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal (10.6 million), São Tomé and Príncipe and Mozambique. It is also one of the official languages of the special administrative region of Macau (with Chinese) and East Timor, (with Tetum). It is the language of most of the population in Portugal (100%), Brazil (100%), São Tomé and Príncipe (99.8%) and Angola (80%), and is the most widely spoken language in Mozambique (40%), though only 6.5% are native speakers. No data are available for Cape Verde, but almost all the population is bilingual, and the monolingual population speaks Cape Verdean Creole.

Small Portuguese-speaking communities subsist in former overseas colonies of Portugal such as Macau, where it is spoken by 7% of the population, and East Timor (13.6%).

Uruguay gave Portuguese an equal status to Spanish in its educational system at the north border with Brazil. In the rest of the country, it is taught as an obligatory subject beginning in the 6th grade.

Portuguese and Spanish are the fastest-growing European languages (with the exception of English, being the world lingua franca), and, according to estimates by UNESCO, the Portuguese language has the highest potential for growth as an international language in southern Africa and South America.

Portuguese is a pluricentric language with two main groups of dialects, those of Brazil and those of the Old World. For historical reasons, the dialects of Africa and Asia are generally closer to those of Portugal than the Brazilian dialects.

Its main subdivisions are:

• Africa
• Asia
• Brazil
• Uruguay
• Portugal
  • Barranquenho
• Spain

Especially in its most informal varieties, there can be considerable differences in grammar between Brazilian Portuguese and European Protuguese, too. The most prominent ones concern the placement of clitic pronouns, and the use of subject pronouns as objects in the third person. In colloquial Brazilian Portuguese, non-standard inflections are also common.

Within the two major varieties of Portuguese, most differences between dialects concern pronunciation and vocabulary. Below are some examples:

words for bus

Angola & Mozambique: machimbombo

Brazil: ônibus

Portugal: autocarro

slang terms for to go away

Angola: bazar – from Kimbundu kubaza – to break, leave with rush

Brazil: vazar – from Portuguese “to leak”, Latin vacivu

Portugal: bazar – from Kimbundu kubaza – to break, leave with rush

words for slum quarter

Angola: musseque

Brazil: favela

Portugal: bairro de lata or ilha

As a result, it is important to pay due diligence when localizing translations, voice-overs and other materials and media to the respective target audience so that they feel like they are dealing with “one of their own”.

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