About Portuguese

Portuguese ranks as the sixth most spoken language around the world by total number of native speakers, about 200 million. Of these, about 180 million speakers of Portuguese live in Brazil , making it the most spoken language in South America (approximately 51% of the population).

Portuguese, classified as a Romance language descends from Vulgar Latin, the language spoken by settlers, soldiers, and merchants during the Roman Empire. As a Romance language, it shares several linguistic features (lexicon, morphology, phonology and syntax) with other Romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, and others.

Portuguese originated in Galicia (northern Spain) and Portugal, but was widely spread around the world (the Americas, Asia, Africa) during Portuguese expansion and colonization on the 15 th and 16 th centuries. Today, Portuguese is the official language of nine countries, one of the official languages of The European Union, and one of the official languages of Mercosur.

Portuguese Medical Translation

Common translation pairs in Portuguese are English to Portuguese translations and Portuguese to English translations. In the medical world, English to Portuguese Medical Translation is more prevalent than Portuguese to English Medical Translation. This transpires most likely because English is a language in which much clinical and scientific research is conducted and published, thus many advances in life sciences and medicine are first available in English and then translated into other languages.

An important aspect to take into account when doing translations into Portuguese is that the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil , South America, differs greatly from the Portuguese spoken in other parts of the world (Europe, Asia, and Africa) to the extent that many individuals use the term “Brazilian Portuguese” to refer to the version spoken in the South American continent exclusively. Brazilian Portuguese can be considered almost a different language; the orthography, vocabulary, syntax and grammar differences, in relation to the European and African variants, far exceed those existing among the several varieties of English, Spanish or French. 

Some glaring differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese, as these are the most commonly spoken variants, are listed below and can be found in orthography and vocabulary:

Orthography

The two Portuguese variants present basic spelling differences. For example, some words of the Continental Portuguese have extra letters, abolished in the Brazilian variant, such as actor in Portugal and ator in Brazil (for “actor”), “affected” is afectado in Portugal and is afetado in Brazil . In Portugal “optimal” is óptimo , while in Brazil is ótimo . These spelling rules can become quite confusing. For example, a “fact” is a facto in Portugal and a fato in Brazil . However a fato (“suit”) in Portugal is a terno in Brazil . The accents reflect how some words are pronounced in the two countries. For example, in Portugal there is an acute accent in fenómeno while in Brazil the circumflex accent is used ( fenômeno ); in Portugal they say heterogéneo and in Brasil heterogêneo ; in Portugal they say esplénico and in Brasil esplênico , and so on.   

Vocabulary

There are countless vocabulary differences in the two variants, enough to have some “bilingual” dictionaries dedicated to the European and Brazilian Portuguese.

Since quality in medical translation entail high accuracy (fidelity and transparency), and there are a lot of differences within Portuguese spoken in Portugal and Brazilian Portuguese, proper language variety adaptation should be considered in much detail when translating into Portuguese. At Latino Medica Consultants, translation accuracy is addressed by ensuring that the translation team includes a native speaker of the target language, as well as thorough knowledge of the medical field and topic of translation. If you are a Medical or Life Science business looking for consistent high quality medical translations into Portuguese, please contact us so that we can discuss how we can serve you. Also, feel free to browse through our examples section to review our medical translation work.

Acknowledgement: We want to thank Dr. Lucia Mary Singer, M.Sc., Ph.D. and Carmen Frost R.N., MIM for their contributions to this article.