I’ve recently had my ProZ translation samples accepted and I’ve been granted access to the Translation Center. I have also finished one translation task (Portuguese to English).
I noticed that many of the translation tasks I receive that have Portuguese as the target language have the following instruction: “EU PT please”.
I’m a native speaker of the Brazilian variety of Portuguese. I could attempt to translate a text into European Portuguese by using some of the spelling and vocabulary differences that I know of. Such translation would have an acceptable quality, but not the same as a native Portuguese person (as is usually the case in any translation). I believe a native Portuguese proofreader would be able to make the necessary adaptations to my translation.
However, I have not claimed any of those tasks saying “EU PT please” yet, because I don’t know what the position of the community is on this, which brings me to the question in the topic title: should I claim tasks that have European Portuguese as the target language?
Hello Lucas, thank you for your question, a very interesting one!
I would say this depends on the resources we have, but as a general rule, we prefer European Portuguese speakers to translate those texts, just as we prefer Brazilian Portuguese speakers to translate Brazilian Portuguese translations. In some circumstances, we can accept translators who are not native in the variant, but that would be an exception. This is also to make sure that revisers don’t have to make an extra effort to revise the document because we are relying on them for delivering the project on time.
We have many other translation projects that need to be translated into Brazilian Portuguese. For example, we are gathering a team to translate from Spanish to Brazilian Portuguese for Ecancer. If you speak Spanish, we would be happy to have you working with us!
Hi Ambra, thanks for the clarification. It seems the EU PT tasks always get the native Portuguese speaker they need, so I’ll continue to avoid claiming EU PT tasks unless there is a lack of native European translators.
As for Spanish, I can understand written Spanish well and I’m confident in my ability to translate from it into Brazilian Portuguese (but I wouldn’t translate into Spanish). I did submit sample translations from Spanish into Brazilian Portuguese at ProZ, but I haven’t had any news about them being accepted or not.
If you’re able to tell me more about the Ecancer project and if my skills are considered sufficient, I’d be happy to help.
Hi @LucasMP!
We have a Spanish-Brazilian Portuguese translation project coming up, would you be interested in taking part?
The texts will be training modules on palliative care for our partner eCancer. It is a big project, but you can contribute depending on your availability
Let me know if you’re interested!
