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 For those of us who didn't speak English from childhood,
didn't go to schools where everything was taught in English,
English is a miserable language to learn properly.
By Wilson Velloso
Once upon a time, when I edited the Portuguese edition of Américas for the
Organization of American States, a young lady came for a translation test. I gave her a
short text in English, paper and a typewriter, all the dictionaries she might need, and a
full hour for her to do a translation. After 30 minutes or so, she returned her work. I
just looked at it and said, "I'm afraid, miss, but this is not acceptable."
She exploded., cursed, kicked chairs. She accused me of being unfair, unjust, and
biased because she was a female. I felt bad about it. And I still needed a good
translator, male or female. So I reread her paper. She had written as the title:
"Instituto Mexicano de Artes Finas."
She had fallen into a common trap. Because fine in English means fino in
Portuguese, she never asked herself: "what is an arte fina?" She forgot
that fine also meant _ and still means _ pure, refined, thin, sharp, precise,
superior, elegant, beautiful, pretty, very good, excellent, etc. If she were sharper and
had more vivência, she would have hit the right title:
"Instituto Mexicano de Belas-Artes"
For those of us who didn't speak English from childhood, didn't go to schools where
everything was taught in English, English is a miserable language to learn properly. The
key word is properly.
Yes, English has a fairly simplified grammar and, in spite of being a Germanic
language, includes thousands and thousands of words derived from Latin. And, more recently
(from 1066!), French. But it has many more sounds (phonemes) than Portuguese, Spanish,
French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Romansh, Gallician, and many dialects spoken in what
was once the Western Roman Empire.
It is also a very imperialist language. It does not hesitate in
"stealing" terms from other languages and, after a while, incorporating it to
its dictionaries. This creates much confusion in the mind of foreigners. Specially such
foreigners who, like most Brazilians, never studied their own language too carefully and
have an ordinary vocabulary.
At the OAS there was a retired Brazilian army general who had an administrative job. As
he needed a bit more money than he got, he was given a translation into Portuguese. It was
a short story by A. A. Milne (the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh). The cavalry general did
unexpectedly well. He passed.
But he fell in the same trap many Brazucas fall in. He found a semi-humorous
sentence "There are only two types of women: Nice women and prostitutes" and
translated: "Só existem dois tipos de mulheres: as bonitas e as prostitutas."
(There are only two types of women: pretty women and hookers")
What is wrong with that? A great deal. He made the same error that the young would-be
translator of paragraph one had made. He translated nice as bonitas when he
should have given it a thought and figured that "bonitas or prostitutas"
does not make sense. For the fact is that most ugly, unattractive, so-so women are NOT
prostitutes: they would starve. And that there are many pretty prostitutes. Several became
famous for that!
His mistake was to think that nice had only one meaning. In Milne's sentence,
nice meant "decent". If you pick up a dictionary, you will see that nice means
also fair, just, decent, gentle, delicate, kindly, tasty, good smelling, well done,
pleasant, simpático and a few dozen more terms.
For Brazucas, citizens of Southern tropics, there are many other problems. For
instance, they simply do not know names of trees, flowers, birds, animals, fish, etc of
Portugal, a Northern country.
An old friend of mine, who taught Portuguese at a U.S. agency, knew that oak was carvalho,
although she had never met an uncapitalized carvalho. But she never knew that
maple, a Northern tree (the national tree of Canada), is called bôrdo. One day,
when she treated me to some pancakes at home, I asked her whether she had some xarope
de bôrdo. She looked at me blank, not understanding.
"Xarope de bôrdo? Que diabo é isso?" And I: "Maple syrup."
My friend Julie, who still speaks Portuguese like a carioca, with all the shs
and djs, although she has lived in America longer than in Brazil, has trouble with many
expressions. She tends to do literal translations. For instance, she says "the
mouth's sky" when she means "the roof of the mouth." Of course, she is
thinking of "céu da boca". Some times she says "the ceiling of the
mouth." She thinks that a colloquial way of saying "that's easy" is
"That's rice soup". I laugh because I realize that she is saying "é
canja" with English words.
Place names are extremely difficult. Some possess ancient forms that few Brazilians
ever learned. Because journalists are not too versed in geography, they cause even more
confusion.
The Northern Italian city of Milan is called Milão in Portuguese, and Milano in
Italian. (In German it is Maitland!) How do you call the Swiss city of Aachen, that the
French Swiss call Aix-la-Chapelle? Who knows about Aquisgrán?
In Korea, there was a famous battleground called "Heartbreak Ridge" in
English and "Colline Crèvecoeur" in French. Brazilian papers used both forms,
never thinking it odd that Korean places had names in English and French. In Brazil there
was never a translator brave enough to translate it—in good colloquial
Portuguese—"morro do arrebenta-peito". That's soldiers' talk!
Other times, English forms of names such as Peking, were transliterated into Portuguese
as Pequim, which was acceptable. But after the Second World War, we learned that most
"English" renditions of Chinese names were awful errors, due to much accumulated
earwax and the traditional arrogance of English explorers, codified in the so-called
Wade-Gillis system. Now we know that "our" Mr. Mao Tze Tung was Dong and that
his capital was Beijing. This is the Chinese official spelling now. But, in relation to
postwar name spellings, the Brazilian press is still living before September 2,
1945—when the Surrender was signed.
Wilson Velloso is a veteran Jack of all trades who has practiced
several of them in Brazil—where he was born of Spanish parentage—Argentina, the
UK, and Canada. He is an American citizen by choice since 1955, was chief of press at the
Organization of American States in Washington DC and has been writing on and off for Brazzil
since 1995. He can be reached, sometimes, at vewilson@3oaks.com
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