At the turn of 2021 to 2022, in the new year’s first minute, this English blog went live!
The translated blog was part of a personal training project aimed at my immersion in English throughout this year. The project was divided into phases and shared with my UFMG University students, who could follow my progress through the web page.
I shared the project in the classroom to stimulate our English study, generating positive social pressure. At least for me, it worked!
I attended 100 English conversation classes this year. Mostly private lessons, but many were in groups because it was intellectually stimulating. Teachers and students spread across the globe, united by the Internet. There were many unusual and fun situations. The experience of studying English online certainly deserves its post.
In terms of content, I listened to hundreds of hours of audio, videos, lectures, and courses in English. They dealt with topics I want to write about on this blog and also about my research on inclusive management and digital accessibility.
I studied dozens of song lyrics and was shocked by what many of them meant. When I read the lyrics, I discovered, for example, that In the air tonight is a song about revenge. Revenge??? I always happily listened to this song, sharing with Phil Collins the supposed anxiety of dating a loved one at night. Big mistake… I should have paid more attention to the lyrics before.
I’ve read 14 books in English, and I’m now on my 15th, counting only books not related to work. Because my academic life this year, in terms of reading and research, was almost all in English.
I have participated in some activities, workshops, and productive meetings involving professors, researchers, and/or professionals from some of the most relevant institutions in the world in my field.
I will publish news about these international contacts as soon as their concrete fruits mature. Here, we are supporters of tropical productivity, not “productivism”. Everything is done without a rush, prioritising excellence and quality of life, the central theme of this platform!
At one of these meetings, with about 20 participants, the sun was at every height in the sky, starting with me in Brazil at about 6 am and ending with one person in Australia in the evening. The amalgam that united us there was English, and, as far as I know, I was the only Portuguese-speaking participant and the only one from Latin America.
Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to watch and even talk face to face, I mean, “screen to screen”, with intellectuals and professionals that I deeply admire and who I still haven’t had (and may never have) the privilege to meet live.
All this was only possible because of English. And, of course, also the Web, which allowed me to cross the planet in a single click. As the reader does now if you are not in the same city or country as me.
I confess that I started this platform internationalisation project apprehensive, as the texts are translated myself, with the help of digital translation tools, such as Google Translator, LanguageTool, Grammarly, Scrivener, and dictionaries.
One day I will detail here this step by step. I can already tell you that perfectionism needs to be set aside: every time I reread my translated texts, I find flaws. And that’s okay.
Another apprehension was born of my resistance to the English language, arising from decolonial studies, so present in the academic, cultural, and museum context of which I am a part. I didn’t know this resistance existed until I started translating my blog and felt strange. It seemed to me that I was capitulating to the coloniser.
However, English today is no longer the language of a specific nation. It is a tool of humanity. And I’m glad it’s an easy language to learn. Imagine if it were German? Sorry, my Germanic ancestors, I even considered learning more about this language in the past, but German is hard!
I’m also descended from Portuguese and indigenous Brazilian. I must have other descendants in my family tree that I don’t know about yet. I’ve only been tracing the recent generations, but one day I will investigate this tree further. I’m curious.
Brazil is home to large communities of immigrants and descendants of Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Japanese, Poles, Syrians, Lebanese, etc. So when I’m travelling abroad, and I hear: “You don’t look Brazilian”, I immediately think…“This person knows very little about Brazil”. This country is a fruit salad. There is no such thing as a “typical Brazilian”. If you are travelling in our country, you can only be sure if people are tourists when you talk to them.1
Another curious thing is when some North Americans or Europeans call us “non-Occidental”. Brazil is considered an exotic country; consequently, we Brazilians are also seen as such.
However, because of colonialism, indigenous genocide, and African slavery, tragic chapters in our history, there was an intense Europeanisation of our customs.
In addition to the Portuguese colony, we also had temporary spots of French and Dutch colonisation and local British invasions. They were frustrated attempts to take over the Brazilian territory, suppressed at some point by Portugal.
Brazil became independent of the Portuguese Empire in 1822 and ceased to be a monarchy to become a presidential republic in 1889.
Our country also received numerous Jews of different nationalities, most of them from the Old Continent. Recife city, in the northeast of our country, housed the oldest synagogue in the Americas, dating back to 1637: Kahal Zur Israel (“Rock of Israel” in Hebrew).
More recently, in the scope of conquest through soft power, we suffered a strong cultural influence from the US, some positive, others not so much.
For all that, thinking that someone doesn’t consider me “Western” doesn’t bother me at all, but it sounds pretty funny! Brazil is not just one country. It looks more like a continent. And this cauldron has a bit of everything, a myriad of flavours with a vernacular spice. But much of that mix is made up of what we understand by Occidental Culture.
To give you an idea of this melting pot, my mother says that the language spoken in her grandmother’s home here in Brazil was German. They used Portuguese to talk with people outside. This still happens today in some neighbourhoods, such as Liberdade (Freedom), a Japanese community in São Paulo. And also in some cities in the South, where European languages still compete with Portuguese even in stores and squares.
Two hundred seventy-four indigenous languages remain alive in Brazil, especially in the Amazon rain forest. I even studied Tupi-Guarani2 for some time. Several place names and words incorporated into everyday Brazilian Portuguese have indigenous origins. Eventually, I will tell a little about my language studies other than English.
Of all the cool things that came out of this English immersion, one of my favourites was the blog translation. This allowed me to practice writing and expand the reach of my texts. Probably the majority of people who read me were born in Brazil, even though they are abroad. However, it was lovely to see, throughout the year, the map of access statistics becoming more and more colourful as users located in other countries visited the pages.
Sometimes I was on the statistics dashboard when someone entered from a distant country, in a city whose name I had never heard. So, I looked for images of that place on the Web and wondered who that person was. So far and so close at the same time.
In this blog’s first anniversary year, my top accessed post in English was Time Management System: Time Tracking, Time Blocking, Activity Tagging, and Results from The Analysis. One of my favourites, by the way.
All this was a great stimulus for me, and certainly, my English language training project became a program and will continue indefinitely, as well as my blog in English.
The translation is a time-consuming, challenging, but enriching process. In fact, translating is rewriting. It is a creative exercise. In one of the interviews I listened to this year, a translator of literary books, whose name escapes me now, said that translating is retelling a story. Therefore, it is an authorial production. I totally agree!
For example, I like to make puns in Portuguese. I could choose a word whose sound resembles another, perhaps more provocative or risqué, that I wouldn’t have the courage to write, but I use a resembles one to play with the reader’s subconscious. In translation, these games run into my linguistic limitations or lose strength due to the lack of an equivalent solution. The text, then, needs to be reinvented.
Another feature I use frequently is to explore grammatical gender. In Portuguese, the sun is masculine, and the moon is feminine. Fire and thunder are masculine. Water and rain are feminine. Power, control and dominance are masculine words. Justice, hope and freedom are feminine words. All these inflexions are lost in translation, along with information between the lines that are part of my Portuguese text’s narrative, that romantic and complex language that I love so much.
Yes, this peculiarity of Latin languages touches sexism, as they invest words with gender stereotypes and put the plural in the masculine when referring to men and women. However, such a feature also embraces poetry!
O. Henry, in his short story A New Yorker is Born3, explains that ancient poets teach us that the city is feminine. City, in the Portuguese language, is a feminine noun.
By evoking this fact, O. Henry wants to instil in the reader all the intellectual and emotional charge associated with femininity, now an attribute he lent to the city. I don’t need to explain this in a text in Portuguese. It is enough to write city, and this imagery construct will unconsciously invade those who read me, even more so if reinforced by other literary strategies.
These differences between English and Portuguese became a delicious challenge for me. The fact is that I found myself in love with English and translation. I desire to translate more and more posts in this new year!
If the English language, by becoming hegemonic, carries a cultural legacy that spreads throughout the world, the opposite is also true. Through English, I can share my Brazilianness. The blog, therefore, is this little Brazilian boat that travels far and wide on the virtual waves of our immense cyberspace…
Notes
Please help me improve my English by submitting your suggestions through this contact form.
Post published on my Portuguese blog on January 1, 2023.
1 – In the video First Impressions of Brazil, from the Divert Living channel, this plurality of the Brazilian people is shown in a very amusing way. The video is quite interesting. I liked the selection of cultural aspects they chose. “My” Rio de Janeiro is very different from the one shown in the video because the couple focused on the most famous types of leisure and tourism in this wonderful city. One day I will present Rio’s other cultural activities on the blog, such as libraries, museums, theatres, botanical gardens, etc. It’s worth watching the video if you want to visit Brazil.
2 – The Tupi-Guarani branch is an important indigenous linguistic family that encompasses several languages in Brazil, including neighbouring countries with territories occupied by the Amazon rain forest.
3 – William Sydney Porter, under the pseudonym O. Henry, book Contos (Short Stories) by Carambaia publishing house, São Paulo, 2016. Organisation and translation to Portuguese by Jayme da Costa Pinto.
Acknowledgments: Alberto Nogueira Veiga, Paulo Rocha, and all who gave me their precious feedback, thank you for your comments and suggestions.
Images: Post-its (Polina Tankilevitch, Pexels), Project’s website (plugin Panorama), Gramado city (Ana Cecilia Rocha Veiga), Short Stories book, O. Henry (Ana Cecilia Rocha Veiga), Statistics Map (Google Analytics).
