Hi: I have just seen this message thread, while doing some research on the Web, and I would like to address some of the points raised here. I am a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese, a professional linguist, with over 20 years' experience in the localisation field, and I have been working with machine translation for several years as well. I mention this because, both as a user and as a linguist, I agree that it is a serious issue to have both varieties of Portuguese (Brazilian and European) mixed up in your MT engine. I have tested Google Translate countless times as part of my job and for research purposes, and very often I get sentences in which the same term is translated into European Portuguese and then into Brazilian Portuguese. This should not happen, and it should not be so hard to avoid it. When you train the MT engine, I suppose you know in advance the source of the material you are using, so you could keep Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese texts separate, in order to avoid this problem and to make your translations more reliable and more correct. I would also like to comment on Gui's message. You rightly mention that Portugal was a very powerful nation about 500 years ago. However, we are now in the 21st century, and a great many things have changed since then. I could mention that nowadays Brazil is one of the most rapidly growing economies in the world, a huge market, internationally recognised as one of the nations about to become a world leader in the near future. I could also mention that nowadays the number of native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese far surpasses the number of speakers of European Portuguese (by far more than a hundredfold). However, to be more objective: the fact is that there isn't a regional variety of a language that is "better" than the other ones. The Brazilian, African and European varieties of the Portuguese language are equally correct, valuable, valid and, to use your own term, also equally "real". Any linguist can tell you this. The problem is that this is much more than a linguistic issue - it encompasses different cultures and, sadly, from time to time, misconceptions about the validity of one another's language varieties do occur. Please do not continue to spread this misconception, though. "Your" Portuguese" is just as valid, correct and *real* as "mine" (and, by the way, a language does not "belong" to someone specific - it belongs to everyone who makes use of it, it is dynamic and it constantly evolves and changes). One variety of Portuguese is not better than the other ones - they are just different, that's all. And, Google developers, please take into account this and similar discussions to improve your MT engine! Best wishes from one of your Brazilian users.
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-translate-general/-/eWxaeTk4ZVNVTDRK. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
