|
About the Articles Knowledgebase
|
ProZ.com has created this section with the goals of:
Further enabling knowledge sharing among professionals
Providing resources for the education of clients and translators
Offering an additional channel for promotion of ProZ.com members (as authors)
We invite your participation and feedback concerning this new resource.
|
|
|
|
Articles by this Author
»
The Language of Inflation
|
Traps in translating Brazilian Portuguese financial documents.
|
»
Translating a Brazilian Balance Sheet
|
Have you ever translated a balance sheet? Pretty dull stuff. Intellectually unrewarding. Once you have translated one you have translated them all. Or so most people think�but I strongly disagree. Lots of repetition and near-repetition, yes. But I see this as a plus, not as a minus. Repetition gives me more chances to try different approaches and solutions; near-repetition gives me a chance to fin ...
|
»
The Language of Business Entities in Brazil
|
Simply stated, it is
not the same thing. Take a car, for instance. Brazilian engineers and
American engineers (or Chinese engineers, for that matter) will discuss
cars using different languages, but they will be discussing a car�and a
car is a car, a definite plus, at least as far as translation is
concerned.
I can translate carburador as carburetor and
be reasonably su ...
|
»
From Shoebox to SQL
|
Are you old enough to have had a shoebox glossary? In the old times, many of us did. Most of the cards were blank; many were incomplete, all usually all out of order. We were always in the hope that someday we would have the time and courage to complete, correct and alphabetize the stuff, which most of us never did. Shoebox glossaries were cumbersome, but considered very practical, because the ind ...
|
»
His Excellency and His Interpreter
|
The President of Brazil visited Africa in early November 2003 and made certain statements during his stay in that continent. The contents of the statements themselves need not concern us: he did not talk about translation and this is not the Poughkeepsie Review of International Politics. An interpreter translated what he said and that concerns us, because this, as you very well know, is the Tran ...
|
»
The Law of Business Organizations under the New Brazilian Civil Code
|
There is this great little law, Lei Complementar 95, of February 26, 1998, about how a proper Brazilian law should be drafted. Required reading for every professional interested in legal translation, I would say. This and all other Brazilian laws can be found in www.planalto.gov.br, which is an official federal government site and I strongly recommend that you bookmark it. Now this law says that ...
|
»
The Language of Inflation Traps in Translating Brazilian Portuguese
|
Late in
1996 financial statement indexation was officially extinguished. That
supposedly sounded the death knell for inflation. Inflation may be
dead, but it has left its marks on our language�and they still haunt
translators and users of translations alike. I have this hunch that
dictionaries will never cope with them effectively.
The most egregious mark of inflation is Corre��o ...
|
»
Going Broke in Brazil
|
People, companies
and even whole countries seem to be going insolvent left and right
these days, so I thought something on insolvency and bankruptcy would
be in order. Who knows what we will have to translate tomorrow�if we
are not bankrupt ourselves, that is. What happens to people who cannot pay their debts in Brazil very much depends on whether they are comerciantes, institui��es finance ...
|
»
Translating the Financial Statements of a Brazilian Bank into English What a Brazilian bank must call a van Gogh
|
Before attempting to explain what a Brazilian bank must call a van Gogh, let me try to explain how Brazilian banks prepare their financial statements and how this affects their form and content, as well as Dutch painters. Brazilian banks are organized as Sociedades An�nimas and, as such, must publish financial statements in agreement with the rules laid down by the Lei das Sociedades por A��es a ...
|
»
The Language of the ICMS Tax in Brazil
|
ICMS is the abbreviation of Imposto sobre Opera��es Relativas � Circula��o de Mercadorias e sobre Servi�os de Transporte Interestadual e Intermunicipal e de Comunica��o, ainda que as Opera��es se Iniciem no Exterior (Tax on the Circulation of Goods, Interstate and Intercity Transportation and Communication Services, Even when the Operation is Initiated Abroad). In fact, with ICMS, you get three ta ...
|
»
The Check is not in the Mail-Banking in Brazil
|
The reasonably well-dressed woman in her thirties rises to welcome me. We hold each other by the elbows and our cheeks touch twice, then we sit down. She is my gerente de conta, or what would be called my relationship manager in a U.S. bank. a cheque cancelado is a check annulled for some reason and thus not accepted by any bank. A cancelled check on the other hand, is a cheque compensado. .W ...
|
»
The Business of Translating
|
This article is
based on a short talk I gave on the opening session of the Seventh
Brazilian Translators� Forum and First Brazilian International
Translator�s Forum, held at USP (Universidade de S�o Paulo) in S�o
Paulo, Brazil, on the week of September 7th, 1998.
The inevitable introduction...
Translation is a service business, not an industry or
commerce. The basic difference between ind ...
|
»
Sorry Guys, You Can't Win
|
Some time ago my e-mail included a message posted by a respected colleague discussing the qualities that made a good translator. The message read like her own CV. She believed she was a competent professional, attributed her competence to certain factors and concluded that those factors were indeed universally applicable requirements. In other words, she firmly believed there is only one road to b ...
|
»
An Easy Translation Job
|
The client who claims the job is easy just wants a discount and quicker turnaround. There is no such a thing as an easy translation job. This does not mean the guys are lying: they may believe their own words. However, whatever people say, no matter why or how they say it, there is no such a thing as an easy translation job. Often the translator is unable to identify the difficulties posed by t ...
|
»
Heading for Trouble
|
The subject line exclaimed "H-E-E-E-E-L-P URGENT!!!!" in loud caps and stammering e's. The body of the message began with a desperate (and I translate from the Portuguese) Guys, I got this job and cannot make head or tail of the meaningless legal blah-blah-blah. I have all my dictionaries and glossaries around me and I cannot find the translations. For God's sake, can anyone tell where I ca ...
|
»
Translation Economics 101
|
Translators, like everybody else, with the possible exception of monks and vagrants, wish they could make a little more money and work a little less for it. There is nothing wrong with this. However, many of us try to justify this yearning for a better material life by claiming we are paid comparatively less than other professionals or than our due. To support those claims, some of us oft ...
|
»
What the Guys Said, the Way They Said It, As Best We Can
|
It was a PowerPoint presentation, written in English in the U.S. and translated into Portuguese in Brazil. The client had just called to say that the translation was unacceptable and they would not pay for the job. Too literal, the secretary had said. too many people are overeager to interfere with the original in wanton and unwarranted waysNow, I don't think literalness in itself is a problem. ...
|
»
Translation: A Market in Crisis?
|
Colleagues who attended the 2002 ATA meeting complained that there was a significant reduction in the number of agencies present. Nothing wrong with the ATA itself: just a sign of the times, for our trade is in a state of crisis and the signs of deterioration are seen everywhere, not only in the paucity of participants in the ATA job exchange. Responses to the crisis have been many, diverse and of ...
|
»
Are you Prepared to Meet Your Client?
|
The phone rings: it is a client. A welcome event these days�and not a very frequent one for many of us. But, are you prepared to answer that call? Clients call because they need information, and we should be prepared to provide the information they require in a clear, precise, and concise way. You see, any hesitation will be perceived by the client as lack of confidence and lack of confidenc ...
|
»
What Is the Word for "you" in Portuguese?
|
This brief note is dedicated to all those who have spent a long time learning Spanish and want to add Portuguese as an easy "second" more or less in the same manner a German symphony orchestra would throw in a Strauss waltz as a "bonbon" to finish off an otherwise all-Bruckner night with a light touch. A couple of years ago I flew to Porto Alegre. At the client's office and a ...
|
»
Into English
|
Seven survival tools for translating Brazilian Portuguese into English and Translation Journal's First World Translation Contest
|
»
Coping with You
|
The PM was a bit green. And when the client asked for a few changes, he asked me, with pointed irony "There must be an agreed translation for a simple word like contact. Don't you think so?" the language in Brazil is changing so fast that grammar books cannot keep the pace and what they recommend is not what sounds acceptable to many.Oh, well, when you translate a list of unconnected sentences, ...
|
|
|
printer version