Language translation and training blog

Portuguese is a romance language derived from the Latin spoken by the peoples of the Roman province of Lusitania. It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th centuries as Portugal established a colonial and commercial empire extending from Brazil in the Americas to Goa and other parts of India, Macau in China and Timor. It is currently ranked 7th in the world of the most common languages based on number of native speakers (around 230 million).

The Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, called Portuguese the “sweet language” as it sounds more like Catalan or French than Spanish or Italian. Most of the lexicon of Portuguese is derived from Latin, but due to the occupation of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages by the Moors, and the participation of Portugal in the Age of Discovery, (the intensive exploration and mapping of the globe by Europeans) it has adopted loanwords from all over the world.

Tips for working with people from Portugal:

·         Appearances matter, especially in the cities. People are fashion conscious believing that clothes are a sign of social standing and success.

·         People respect authority and seek/expect guidance and decision-making from people senior to them. Decision making and problem solving tend to be directed from the top with little attention to building consensus or involving junior colleagues.

·         In written communications, maintain a sense of formality and be mindful of the status of the person you are communicating with. English is not widely spoken beyond a basic level, so have brochures or contracts available in Portuguese.

·         In face to face communication, expect to invest time developing the relationship which means that speaking Portuguese will ease your progress.

“A falar é que a gente se entende.”  -  Talking is the way for people to understand each other.

Not every speaker of a language can translate and not every translator can translate all documents. To translate documents with technical content or specific style requirements (such as marketing collateral, websites or presentation slides) you need a translator who understands the source text properly, knows what your readers will expect and has access to the dictionaries, on-line reference tools and glossaries to do your text justice.

Our translators are experts in specific subject areas, have access to all the tools they need and are supported by qualified post-translation editors and project managers. We are certified to EN 15038, the specialist quality standard for translations so you can have peace of mind.

For more information contact Robertson Languages International or email xin@robertsonlanguages.co.uk.

Occupations or professions have a language of their own. Professionals in medicine, law, finance and defence use terms in specific ways and expect to see vocabulary that is unfamiliar to the layman.

Law            A devi is someone to whom freehold land is given in a will.

Finance            An Initial Public Offering (IPO) is the first sale of privately owned equity (stock or shares) in a company via the issue of shares to the public and other investing institutions.

Medicine          “croaking” is a term used to describe a particular breathing complication in new-born infants

Defence           binary chemical munitions contain two chemicals, isolated in separate containers for safety, which react together when combined as a result of being armed or fired, producing a chemical agent.

Most areas of business also have their own jargon and preferred style of language. The documents and subject matter of meetings are quite different in the HR, marketing, finance and IT departments of any institution. Even in your own language that can be a challenge. Imagine having to know technical terms in a foreign language, whether it is your foreign colleagues on assignment in UK or your British colleagues working in a foreign language.

A tailor made language course that addresses the specifics of professions or functional areas of your business is vital. We provide languages training in English for nurses, doctors, accountants and sales people and courses in most languages for specific business or communication skills, such as Writing Reports, Giving Presentations, Interviewing, Leading Meetings, Customer Care, Sales Order Processing and many more. For a more complete list click this link to the relevant part of our website:

www.robertsonlanguages.co.uk/index.php?p=267&pp=137&title=Specialist_language_courses.

For more information contact Robertson Languages International or email osk@robertsonlanguages.co.uk.

There are 18 major languages spoken in India and over 1,600 regional dialects. Hindi is the official language of India, spoken by about half the population, mostly in North India. Hindi can be traced back to the 7^th or 8th century. The dialect that has been chosen as the official language is Khariboli using the Devanagari script. Some of the many other dialects of Hindi are Brajbhasha, Bundeli, Awadhi, Marwari, Maithili and Bhojpuri. Hindi is spoken by over 437 million people worldwide.

Some of the major Indic languages (ie the languages of the whole Indian sub-continent) are Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Bengali is the state language of West Bengal where many people only speak Bengali. Urdu is the state language of Jammu & Kashmir, was developed in Delhi and is mainly spoken by the Muslim population. It is written in the Arabic script and includes many Persian words. Sanskrit is one of the oldest languages in the world.

Although English is widely used for government, legal purposes and further education, the Indian Ministry of Education is concerned that only 1% of the population speaks English well enough for business purposes, and is seeking to remedy this as India plays an increasing role in the world economy.

When doing business in India consider the following:

·         At a first meeting make sure you present and exchange business cards. Find out what the local language is and have your card translated. If you travel widely and do not wish to have several languages on your card, you might choose Hindi.

·         Be sure to receive and give with your right hand.

·         Make sure the card is put away respectfully and not simply pushed into a trouser pocket.

·         Meetings in India will generally begin with friendly small talk. This may include personal questions about family and is seen as a way of building rapport and trust before business.

“You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once.” (Czech proverb)

If you want to keep up your New Year resoution to learn a language this year, you must keep yourself motivated.

Can you see yourself in any of the following scenarios? Imagine how much better life would be if you could say and understand more.

Family Communication

You can talk to members of your family that come from another country. By speaking their language you can join in family and social occasions, get to know them better and have more fun.

Work

Whether on a long-term overseas assignment or a short business trip, speaking the language at work means you have better conversations and closer relationships with clients and colleagues. Selling or negotiating in the language of your clients can make all the difference in securing business. If you travel, having a grasp of the basics makes life so much easier. How often have you felt you weren’t getting through or suspected you’ve been overcharged?

Doing Business Abroad

If you are setting up or running a business operation overseas it is critical that you speak the local language and understand “how things are done around here”. Even if you just want foreign suppliers, it is crucial to communicate with them in terms they understand. It is also one way to make that initial connection. If you make the effort to speak to them in their mother tongue they are more likely to warm to you and want to help you.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” - Nelson Mandela

Personal Development and Career Progression

The downside of English being so widespread is that speaking English hardly makes you special. Many companies seek a second or even a third language in addition to English for global positions. If your experience is that work meetings are held in English, you will need some knowledge of colleagues’ other languages if you are not to be left out of routine or less formal communication.

Owning a Holiday Home

If you have a bolthole in some far-off land, whether France, Croatia, Spain or Thailand, it will help enormously if you speak the local language. Then you can deal effectively with builders, estate agents, lawyers and local tradesman, making the whole experience much less stressful.

To find out how Robertson Languages International can help you start, improve or master your chosen language, take a look our Languages Training Information or give us a call on +44 118 934 6000

“If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning” Gandhi

The French have taken a lot of stick over the past few decades (not least from some of their own countrymen!) for their heroic resistance to the tidal wave of Anglification that has swept the fields of business and technology. To be fair, this mindset - sanctioned at official level through legislation such as the Loi Toubon of 1994 and lists of approved ‘French’ words for official use - has produced some rather bizarre curios. Ask any French person what the word bouteur means, and you’ll almost certainly be treated to a Gallic shrug in reply: it was originally invented in an office somewhere to give French people a way of not having to say le bulldozer. As it turns out, the word never really caught on in France; although I’m told Francophone Canadians (for whom the invasion of English is possibly an even more keenly-felt issue than it is in France- check a map to see why!) still quite like it. The French language has also - so far - failed to come up with decent home-grown alternatives to such dubious imports as le parking, le camping and le weekend.

However, the news is not all bad for lovers of a ‘purer’ form of French. In fact, I’m blogging now because two marvellous terminological successes have just come to mind, both of which have achieved the not-inconsiderable feat of having entered common French usage despite their firm roots in the world of the Internet - a domain in which Anglo-Saxon words and phrases have traditionally ruled supreme. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…

Internaute

It’s time for the English-speaking peoples of the world to slap their heads in unison and say, why didn’t we think of that first? The best Anglophone attempt that comes to mind to describe a person browsing pages on the Web is a ’surfer’, but I think the best that can be said for that particular term is that it has gone on to give us an entertaining new twist on the phrase ‘silver surfer‘. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but perhaps we should petition the British government to pass a law mandating the introduction of the beautifully adventurous-sounding word ‘Internaut’ (yup, we can do without the final ‘e’, thanks) into the Queen’s English. Heaven knows we’ve, er, ‘liberated’ enough words from the French in the past; maybe they won’t notice?

Pourriel

And you thought the last one was clever… Not surprisingly, there are many in France who dislike the use of the English word ‘email’, and its semi-French bastard cousin mêle, and so it came to be that the French word courriel was invented (and frequently used by real French people, too) as a contraction of courrier électronique, meaning ‘electronic mail’. Fine, but how do you then describe an offshoot of this concept such as junk email? Enter stage left the wonderful word pourriel (pourri = rancid, corrupted, disgusting). The only thing that stops this from being absolutely perfect is the fact that as an English speaker, you’ll probably now never think of pot pourri in quite the same way again. Sorry about that.

Start 2010 with a new Podcast from Robertson Languages International

• a short funny skit on translation errors
• top 10 tips on learning a language from our language teachers for the new year
• music from 38 Acres courtesy of Music Alley’s Podsafe Music Network

Download | Subscribe

in its annual quality of life index, International Living Magazine has ranked France the best country to live in in the world. France has now won the top place out of 194 countries for five years in a row. Congratulations to France!

Robertson Languages is proud to announce that we have translated some of the documentation presented to the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen.

For marvellous Christmas festivity and fun, check out our Robertson Languages video at http://www.robertsonlanguages.co.uk/index.php?p=167&pp=141&title=Video_Gallery. The Twelve Days of Christmas have never looked so good. Merry Christmas everyone!