Monthly Archives: February 2010

‘Following the Euro’ short documentary

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There’s a short documentary on Current about Brazilians reclaiming their Italian citizenship due to a loophole in the system. Basically there’s an Italian law that says if you have an Italian ancestor, you qualify to become an Italian citizen (and EU passport holder). Many Brazilians though are using the law to have access to other European countries, rather than stay in Italy.

With Italy’s low birthrate, it might do the country good to somehow give citizenship to those who stay in Italy for 5 years before leaving, and therefore create ties to Italy…and why not, some good-looking babies who would speak two of the most beautiful languages in the world.

On a side note, here’s my article on Italians in Brazil (in English & Portuguese).

ProZ Term Questions – New Link

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Over at ProZ, “the translation workplace”, they have a section where members can ask and answer translation requests for words or expressions. It is pretty similar to Word Reference forums (which can be found in my links page) although on ProZ, you will mostly find requests which are professionally-oriented so the terms listed will probably be of a more formal or obscure nature.

Spelling reform comic – Part 1

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(click to enlarge)

In the quadrinho (comic strip) Grump by Orlandeli, last year’s acordo ortográfico (spelling reform) was used as the subject matter of a series he did in January of 2009. Little by little, I will be going over the spelling reform here on Eyes on Portuguese because most sites teaching Portuguese haven’t adjusted their lessons to the new reform. Below, I will translate each quadro (square) of the comic.

Primeiro quadro

“I had an idea. I am going to ask for help from my nephew to understand the agreement. For these kids, it’s a cinch. They are learning now. They don’t have our bad habits because we have been using the old rules for a long time now.”

Segundo quadro

“Hello, nephew. Everything good? By chance, are you in the know about the rules of the spelling reform?”

Terceiro quadro

“Wazzzzuppp Tuimmmm! What’s crackin? Ain’t no thang, yo. Why don’t u roll on thru cuz we can learn dat ish togetha! looool”

“It’s probably best I come up with another idea.”

In the first square of the comic, the words molecada and moleza are used, both of which are slang. Moleque (often misspelled ‘muleque‘) is how you would call a bratty kid in English a “little punk”. It is also used in a general sense to speak of someone who is immature or not yet acting like a man. Since in Portuguese the suffix -ada can be used to speak of a group or of an action (see the end of this post I just linked), molecada means a group of moleques. The second term, moleza, is equivalent to saying something is easy, a cinch, nothing complicated.

For the third square, I improvised in the translation to best represent what it might sound like if an American teenager (influenced by hip-hop culture) would have said it. In Portuguese, the sad state of the nephew’s writing is called miguxês or neo-miguxês, something which I will address in the next post. The second line of the third square is what I would consider the equivalent in English to what was written in the comic.

Thanks to Street Smart Brazil for emailing this comic a while back.

Morro do Boi criminal gets 65 years

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One year ago, I decided to post a very sad story on a young couple who, while walking to the top of a hill overlooking a beach in Paraná, was confronted by a criminal that ended up murdering the young man (Osiris), shooting the young woman (Monik) and then coming back to rape her. In the comments section of the post I did on it, someone who knew Osiris, expressed how sad she was to learn of the news of his passing, as her memories of him were fond ones.

In any event, after one year and a lot of enrolação (getting tied up), the right person was condemned (in PT) to 65 years in jail, thanks to the initial sketch that Monik, the young female survivor, helped to create. Meanwhile, she is hard at work doing physical therapy to regain feeling in her legs after becoming parapalegic due to the attack.

In the world we live in, we can get so unphased by so much bad news being reported that it doesn’t effect us as perhaps it should. When I woke up that one morning one year ago and read what had happened, it greatly saddened me that someone felt they had to wreak such havoc on a young couple that only wanted to enjoy their weekend together.

Olhar Estrangeiro – Documentary

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There’s a Brazilian documentary called Olhar Estrangeiro (Foreign Look) about how foreigners see Brazil and since I’ve been bringing up this very subject here, I figured it would be beneficial to talk about the film. Before seeing the documentary, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the source of so many clichês about Brazil and Brazilians but I must say, Olhar Estrangeiro (cough) pretty much hits the nail on the head. The main culprit is cinema and down the list from there, perhaps journalism and music. As one of the American directors says in the film, cinema gives us information that we aren’t searching for, yet we leave the theater influenced by it.

As for one of the questions raised in the documentary that asked if a foreign film can portray Brazil realistically, I’ll hold onto the hope that it’s possible. Or perhaps it’s time I become a director and scriptwriter.

Brasil, Portugal – Lá e Cá

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Starting Sundays from April 25th, 2010 and onwards, on TV Cultura in Brazil and RTP in Portugal, one can find a new program that aims at sharing differences and similarities between the two countries. I’ve seen quite a bit of mutual misunderstanding going on between people from both sides of the Atlantic so hopefully such a program can shed some light on the subject.

If you’d like to see random 10-minute clips of the show, start here.

The Song of Exile – Gonçalves Dias

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The Song of Exile
by Antônio Gonçalves Dias
translated by Nelson Ascher

My homeland has many palm-trees
and the thrush-song fills its air;
no bird here can sing as well
as the birds sing over there.

We have fields more full of flowers
and a starrier sky above,
we have woods more full of life
and a life more full of love.

Lonely night-time meditations
please me more when I am there;
my homeland has many palm-trees
and the thrush-song fills its air.

Such delights as my land offers
Are not found here nor elsewhere;
lonely night-time meditations
please me more when I am there;
My homeland has many palm-trees
and the thrush-song fills its air.

Don’t allow me, God, to die
without getting back to where
I belong, without enjoying
the delights found only there,
without seeing all those palm-trees,
hearing thrush-songs fill the air.

The original can be found here and the translation above is here.

Antônio Gonçalves Dias

Antônio (born in the state of Maranhão) was a Brazilian poet. A respected ethnologist and scholar, he lived much of the time abroad but drowned at age 41 on his way back to Maranhão. His songs, collected in First Poems (1847), More Poems (1848), and Last Poems (1851), which display both exuberance and longing, are a celebration of the New World as a tropical paradise and a glorification of the indigenous people. While in Europe, he wrote a dictionary of the Tupi language. His “Song of Exile” (Canção do Exílio, 1843) is known to every Brazilian schoolchild, and he is regarded as the national poet of Brazil.

Adão ou Somos Todos Filhos da Terra

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A short documentary (in PT) on a resident of the Cantagalo favela in Rio de janeiro. Adão Xalebaradã is a composer of more than 500 songs and yet he had never been recorded in Brazil until the following video was made in 1999. I wonder how many more Adãos are out there…

100 best Brazilian songs plus ‘brinde’

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Luciana at Street Smart Brazil led me to a Rolling Stones magazine link dedicated to the 100 best Brazilian songs listed, described and available to be listened to. The only drawback is if you don’t speak Portuguese as then you would have to use an online translation service.

As a ‘brinde’ (freebie), the multilingual European music and culture site Mondo Mix has its own list of Brazilian singer profiles which if you click on your prefered singer profile, in many cases you’ll find the Mondo’mix Video Report, such as this one on Seu Jorge.

Technology vs language learning

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While keeping up with my fair share of technology news, I come across the odd article on language learning and how technology is helping us in this field. The question is helping us with what? While one side is offering different ways to assist us with language learning itself (Mango, Rosetta Stone, LiveMocha, etc), the dark side, as I will deem it, is taking away the need to actually learn anything.

This darker side (usually promoted by Google) encourages the use of technology over the study of another language, so that we may take a picture of a menu or street sign in another language (see article link above) instead of actually knowing what the sign or menu says because we have put hard work into studying that langauge. Additionally, there are advances in translation software, helped along by crowd-sourced corrections, that practically render knowing another language for business or pleasure obsolete. Team that with the fact so many of us are walking around with mini computers in our pockets which are wired to the Internet and for the would-be budding lingophile, the magic comes from someone else’s knowledge rather than our own. As icing on the cake, Google is hard at work on voice-to-voice translation technology as well.

For the more beautiful living langauges among us, such as Portuguese, where does that leave us? It will most-likely leave us with a population of would-be language lovers who visit Brazil without the need to place any effort into understanding the intricacies of its culture, much less the language because their smartphone puts the magic of language learning at the tips of their fingers rather than on the tips of their tongues.

For more on the subject, see the comments section for a follow-up discussion.