Portuguese Translation for Angola?
Posted by Jim Cottrell on Fri, Aug 15, 2008 @ 04:26 PM
Last week, I received a request to translate a document from English into Portuguese for the country of Angola. To be honest, that was the first time I had heard of Angola. There is an Angola, Indiana; but for some reason, I didn't think that's what the client had in mind.
We have done a lot of Brazilian Portuguese translation and even Portuguese translation for Portugal. But, thinking this might require a special localization of the language, I embarked on a little research mission asking my Portuguese translators about any differences and finding out a little bit about the country online.
Here are some tidbits that you might be interested in:
- Angola is a country in South-Central Africa with a population of 16 million.
- Portugal rules over Angola for 400 years and became independent in 1975.
- Portuguese for Angola is practically the same as Portuguese for Portugal. While there are a few minor differences in the spoken Portuguese, the written Portuguese is the same.
Since then, I've heard a lot about Angola thanks to the Summer Olympics. First, I noticed Angola in the opening ceremonies with their 32 athletes participating mainly in basketball and handball. Then, I watched USA beat Angola in basketball 92-69 on Tuesday. And, China later beat Angola on Thursday. In that game, it was actually very close until the third quarter when China started to run away with it.
Then, I heard about Angola this week in the news about how they have an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of oil discovered in oil fields within Angola. I had no idea.
That is one cool thing about working with language translations. Along the way, I learn a lot about other countries and cultures that I didn't know anything about. Now that I know more about Angola, I'll be more aware of what is going on in that part of the world, whether I'm involved with a Portuguese translation job or not.