Beti L

I read a research in Brazil (my home country) reporting that approximately 58% of Brazilian population has access to Internet. Since Brazilian population surpassed 200 million, it means 100 million Brazilians access Internet. As can be seen in charts presented in Option D, around 131 million of Portuguese speakers are Internet users, so most of them are Brazilians.

In addition, Portuguese is one of the world’s top languages and one of the top ten languages in Internet. The research reference suggested explains that dominant countries tend to export more and translate little while dominated countries export little and import a lot of translated contents.

United States and England are developed countries, with a lot of new technologies, patents and contents. In addition, even when English is not spoken in a certain country, when something is created, developed, found out, discovered, it usually requires translation into English in order to be recognized and acknowledged. Thus, most world’s advances and progresses are reported in English. Scientific research is published in English in journals in order to be verified.

Brazil is a developing country, what would be within the definition of dominated country as per research reference provided. So the country requires a lot of translation from English. Most technologies used in Brazil are foreign technologies. When there’s special know-how requirement, Brazilians usually import it. Brazilians sell raw materials for cheap prices and import them as manufactured goods for expensive prices since Brazilians have no technology and industry to do that on their own. Brazilians have a long way to improve education and industry. Brazilian infrastructure is small and outdated. There’s a huge market for improvement in Brazil. And it is a country that watches U.S. movies and buys U.S. goods, including, without limitation, clothes, songs, software (e.g., Windows, Android, Facebook), hardware, contents, entertainment, food franchises. Brazil is eager for technology and innovation. In fact, United States is the second business partner of Brazil in both imports and exports.

It is hard to ignore a 100 million market. In addition, people tend to buy only what they understand and where they understand. No one would purchase anything from a Web site with automatic or poor translation. Translation has to be good and localized in order to be effective. Those who ignore that are doomed to fail in any market.

In view of that, I can see a prominent outlook and future for English into Brazilian Portuguese translation industry.

Writer Beli L is Brazilian Portuguese Language and Translation Intern at Modlingua, India's No1. certified translation and Language service providers based in New Delhi