The power of translations

Posts0Likes0Joined19/9/2019LocationSão Paulo / BR
Native
Portuguese
Learning English, French, Italian, Spanish

Languages are changeable, we all know that, but I'd like to talk about how translations play a role in this process and evolution. In my mother language (Brazilian Portuguese) there have been many changes lately which can only be explained by the influence of English and careless translations. It even became a joke about how people tend to use the gerund in an abusive way, which is not typical of the language, and is clearly the reproduction of the English Future Continuous (not exactly where it would be used in English itself). This was credited to the translation of telemarketing training material, so what could be said in a direct way becomes unnatural. For example, "vou te ligar" becomes "vou estar te ligando" ("I'll be calling you").

Another example is the word we use for billboard: "outdoor". Yes, we use the English adverb as a noun. People say this is because the first billboards were imported and "outdoors" was written in the packaging.

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