Carla Cardoso

CC

Community interpreter, freelance translator and videogame journalist.

Location Portugal

Achievements

Activity

  • Case 2 seems like a preparedness issue. If the person isn't prepared in advance for said meeting, chances are there will be delays, issues won't be exposed properly, and it all snowballs from there.

    Case 3 can be just a simple "I'm not comfortable speaking in public". I'd ask the junior member to write down his impressions instead and turn them in later.

  • Content 17
    Time 15
    Action 14
    People 9

    Suits me. I like content to be explained properly and directly, I like things done in a timely fashion, I like to take action/initiative and I definitely prefer to work alone rather than in a team.

  • Mary Catherine Bateson's insight speaks to me because I love to listen to people talk about their experiences.

  • "she hadn’t interacted with any of them beyond the initial email introductions, she expected that they would process the bills as necessary" - This is basically assumption. You can't just assume people automatically know what to do when receiving whatever documents, or even if they're prepared for it.

    I had management that worked like that and then...

  • The most common stereotype for me was the "girls don't play videogames". I ran an all-female staff gamer site where we wrote articles, reviews and game guides, and used to get that kind of comment all the time. At first it was sort of funny because it was weird, but after a while it just got annoying. Going to several E3 (gaming industry press events) shows...

  • 1. From family and educational influences: respect, discipline, tolerance, love for learning and reading, honesty, kindness, creativity.

    2. From other influences: persistence, optimism, humor and perseverance through adversity from dealing with chronic illness; patience from dealing with rude customers and some pretty bad staff while working as retail...

  • I like to be direct, task focused, very time focused (when I say 10 am, it's 10, not 10:15, not 9:50), somewhat expressive (much more if with friends or family), conciliatory and I'm in between the individual and collective mind sets. I do use humor a lot, it's what keeps me going.

  • Intercultural competence has been with me since I was a child, due to contact with natives from other Portuguese colonies and my own extended family in Brazil and France.

    During my interpreter training we had a class of several nationalities: Portuguese, French (both France and Quebec), Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, Chinese, Venezuelan,...

  • @KathleenVaughan Maybe watching them in English anyway, but with subtitles in a second language? Depending on where they are watching, there should be subtitles available in other languages, or dubs with English subtitles. Netflix, for example, allows us to mix and match voice overs and subtitle languages.

    I never cared for dubbed movies/shows. All Disney...

  • Television was definitely responsible for me learning English, I started when I was about 7 or 8 watching Follow Me. Had no clue what they were saying, so context was everything and I picked up a few things. I used to want to learn English because I wanted to know if what was written in the Portuguese subtitles matched what people were saying in movies.

    I...

  • My cultural identity would be Portuguese (from Portugal) and European from having travelled to some other countries. Growing up in Portugal, the ties to Brazil and Africa made it so we the contact with those other cultures was a regular thing. I had neighbors from Johannesburg who were like grandparents to me. I also have family in France, which influenced my...

  • Knowledge, values, traditions.

  • Carla Cardoso made a comment

    I found this course a very enjoyable experience, one that brought back a lot of memories and helped me recall past personal experiences and prior learning.

    Thank you to the lecturers for making it possible, and to the community for their insightful comments.

    I would love to see further courses on translation and interpreting on FutureLearn!

  • We rarely had any sort of briefing. For the most part, we got a simple be there, at this time, for a doctor's appointment, and the client's name. Basically, we briefed the service providers and clients on what our job was once the meeting started.

    We would have to stress that:
    - we were there to interpret EVERYTHING that is said to the best of our...

  • What do you think of favouring fluency and creating a ‘foreign’ effect?
    A translation should read as an original and feel familiar to the target reader, not "foreign". The message and its function should be preserved.

    What makes a good translation of a novel or a poem in your view?
    Being faithful to the author's message, thoughts and emotions and...

  • I can relate! I borrowed a Portuguese edition of The Lord of the Rings from a cousin several years ago... regretted it a few pages in. It was not a EU-PT translation to begin with, which was already annoying to me in terms of grammar, but the worst part were sentences that would just end abruptly and made zero sense. It was like parts of text were just missing...

  • I love literary translation because it allows for a higher creative expression. While I studied translation in Portugal, we only briefly touched it as a practical exercise, but they were my favorite.

    I strongly believe that being an avid reader and a good writer are a must for becoming a literary translator, as well as communicating with the author of the...

  • Carla Cardoso made a comment

    A computer mouse in Portugal also takes the name of its rodent counterpart (rato).

    I think an appropriate English translation for Rollkugel is "trackball" as this device seems like the predecessor for what has become the modern trackball, which is a specific type of mouse with a ball that you roll with your thumb in order to move the cursor. Trackball is...

  • I absolutely love the availability of online resources nowadays. It has made everything so much easier.

    When I studied translation back in Portugal, the internet was a fairly new thing and there was very little in terms of glossaries, but there was still some material to be found. Homework was always a time-consuming book consulting experience and lengthy...

  • The assignment in 4.4 was to write a brief following the formula based on Sonia Colina's Fundamentals of Translation. Which assignment are you referring to?

  • Carla Cardoso made a comment

    In example 1, I can't change the negative test into anything else. In Portuguese, it would be "teste negativo", I wouldn't need to look that up anywhere because it's the only term used in that context.

    But in example 2, I can use pessimistic.

    My most specialized text... One of my exams included a page from FIFA's Court of Arbitration. I nearly had a...

  • @BarbaraM Do you mean the assignment with the translation brief? There is no actual translation, you just write the brief containing the points mentioned (Function, Audience, Medium, Motive, Time and place).

  • A second pair of eyes can be so helpful after we've read, re-read and triple read the same text. Things just start blending in the more time we spend with it, so saving the revision for a next day or the day after can be beneficial when we have the time.

    With regards to the QA part of translation, I did a short translation project management course on...

  • Machine translation cannot replace human translation. There are too many cultural differences, expressions, idioms and grammar rules (ex: subject verb agreement) that a machine translation can't grasp.

    Google translate is actually pretty bad when it comes to PT/EN. I've done some PMTE on general and wellness articles that were automatically translated with...

  • The abstract would require more work and attention in terms of technical terminology, possibly researching some terms. But at the same time, if we are accepting that type of work, we would have to assume we KNOW the topic, so it shouldn't take the translator more than a few hours.

    An email would contain more generalized language, especially if it's short,...

  • @HelenGräwert For me it was subtitles growing up, I enjoyed listening to the original and matching to what's written. It helped me expand my vocabulary.

    @AlessandraDeMarco Ugh, fake accents... those usually end up falling a bit into stereotypes and don't sound realistic. But are you saying that when dubbing into Italian, the voice actors reading the lines...

  • I was familiar with the original Jacques Brel song and am aware of a Portuguese version as well. Was glad to have found it on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUb8pg-vpYU

    The opening line basically translates to "Don't go and leave me", which fits the rhythm of the song better. Overall, the Portuguese version is very similar to the original in French.

  • I prefer her French songs as well, they seem to have more meaning and feeling put into them.

  • Ideally, I would implement an audio-guide of sorts. Visitors would be equipped with a tablet and headphones, or download an app to their device. The app would consist of a floor plan and exhibit plan, and include commentary audio files in a variety of languages. Visitors can then freely walk around and experience the contents of the exhibit in their language...

  • I've mentioned Celine Dion before due to her bilingualism and ties to Canada. She has has some songs in both English and French. Using the song below as comparison, the lyrics don't seem nearly as sad in the English version, but we can still get the sense of a love song, but not of a break-up song....

  • I'm going to guess English is the original. They mention a "research project" (more specific) while in the Italian version, it's only referred to as "project" (more general).

  • https://padlet.com/ceilt/u7e6a6qpplv0/wish/1377132565

    Ideally, the interpreter sits or stands slightly behind and to the side of the client, facing the service provider. Distance and positioning does matter, as if you are too far away, you may not hear properly (I've ended up across the room behind a screen once). If you sit closer to the service provider,...

  • I am much more likely to watch a subtitled movie than a dubbed one. More often than not, dubbing is terrible! I also read an article recently where in Poland, it's common to have a single person reading the entire dubbed script. I can't imagine watching anything like that.
    https://www.chido-fajny.com/2017/10/polish-lektor-one-weirdest-things-poland.html

  • I see a red flag right away in "personal or community links to the victim", as it's a breach of one of the ethical principles.

    The other issue is positioning, and for therapy sessions it was recommended we sit to the side and slightly behind the client, as to become more "invisible" and not disturb the therapist-client dialog.

    We covered interpreting...

  • I have seen an illustrated booklet that was given to patients for them to point where their problem was, with words in several languages. It's supposed to be used as visual interpreting tool when an interpreter isn't immediately available. Can't find it... but if you look google healthcare communication board you will see similar examples. Here is one of these...

  • TEFL teachers face this issue all the time with multilingual classes, where the students who speak the same language will have a tendency to help each other. There is a power shift in the sense that instead of interacting with the teacher or requesting help from the teacher, they will go to their peers.

    While universities require proof of English language...

  • I think school manuals for teaching foreign languages at beginner levels fall under the visual and verbal language category as well, since they usually include explanations and instructions in the native language, with exercises in the foreign language.
    Example: https://acessaber.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ava_01.jpg

  • In the sign, I think Chinese would be the original, with the Italian translation positioned just below, only based on the fact that Milano, being a city, isn't capitalized.

    The European Community text is tricky and a tough choice, but I lean towards Italian being the original document due to the use of certain expressions.

  • https://padlet.com/ceilt/u7e6a6qpplv0/wish/1376744933

    This was something I had to fill out a couple of years ago, it's an accessible parking permit application form in English and French. All government forms in Canada have their languages side by side, or one language per side of the page. The translation type present in these forms is interlingual and I...

  • I started learning English by watching Follow Me back in the early 80s. I didn't know what they were saying but the contextual situations helped me understand what was going on. I was 7 or so and loved that show.

    I also learned from song lyrics that used to come in the form of cassette tape inserts, and from there on, started writing lyrics to songs that I...

  • I suppose Celine Dion would be a great example of a bilingual musician, as she has French and English versions of several of her songs. She has also sung in Spanish and Italian.

    Unless I am missing the point and this is more about mixing more than one language into the same song lyrics. I remember Enigma used to mix French and English together in some of...

  • I don't think someone who is multilingual is a translator in the professional sense. I would classify them a community/cultural translator.

  • @LoredanaPolezzi I've pondered this same idea, but usually the Venn diagram between gamers and translators doesn't intersect, so finding someone to collaborate on something like this is a hard task. Even if someone has worked in game localization that doesn't guarantee they have played them.

    I remembered a music example from the late 90s, Era. Most of their...

  • I've always wondered if Babel fish were actually tiny certified alien interpreters! :D

    Klingon, Tolkien's Elvish, Dothraki (Game of Thrones) and any made up language are a strange and fascinating phenomenon to me. How can someone come up with all that and construct it so well that it all becomes "real"?

    It happens in games as well. We have Dovahzul (or...

  • Not necessarily better after moving abroad, but immersion is a wonderful thing when it comes to the speaking aspect of things, slang, expressions and idioms for example. But immersion can also include watching or reading the local news in your second language, following events, reading books by authors from that country, researching expressions and idioms....

  • @LeoAquino Oh boy, you opened up the nostalgia box here. There are close to 1000 cards in this house still! :)

    We have the older editions, and I think my favorite flavor texts were the 4th edition black cards. I remember Ashes to Ashes because of the "All rivers run to the sea" bit. Always thought it was clever because it was "water to water". Some of them...

  • In Portugal, APTRAD's code includes integrity, fidelity and professional secrecy, as stated here: https://aptrad.pt/index.php/codigo-deontologico/

    In Canada, we have the National Standard Guide for Community Interpreting Services: Accuracy and Fidelity; Confidentiality; Impartiality; Respect for Persons; Maintaining Role Boundaries; Accountability;...

  • In Canada, there is also the "duty to report". During our training, it was stressed that domestic violence, child abuse and suicidal cases were worthy of a confidentiality breach. Basically, if a person's life or child's safety is in danger, we MUST report it.

    Some info on the interpreters' code of ethics here:...

  • This mechanic comparison dialog is so true and accurate! I've been in that situation a few times. Can't tell me what you need? Then I can't realistically estimate how long it will take me, sorry.

    It's even worse when they ask you to translate 3 pages of technical text as a "test"... I usually get very suspicious of those, because what reason do I have to...

  • @LoredanaPolezzi The solution could be to use a more generalized expression that could include all of the "coffee situations". For me that would be something like "Vamos beber um café?", which would be the equivalent of saying "Let's go out for coffee."

    If in Portugal I ask a friend "Vamos beber um café?" or "Anda cá a casa tomar um cafézinho!" (Come over...

  • Regarding Assassin's Creed Rogue, I'm not sure in terms of time, it would be interesting to see if the speech was adapted to the period should there be more exploration of the city. But the scene is short and is focused on finding an artifact and escaping during the earthquake. Not historically accurate, the artifact causes the earthquake. I did notice in the...

  • I took a translation project management course that made me more aware of the "low-balling" that goes on when choosing a translator, as well as the sense of urgency and unrealistic expectations. It defeats the purpose of getting a correct translation.

    I was once asked to translate a patient's guide for stroke patients. The client wanted a European...

  • Yes, I am aware of the pronunciation differences in phonetic spelling. What I'm trying to say is that there is no consistency with fan-based translations from previous localized seasons to current season, and even from episode to episode the spelling of the same name will vary.

    Marielle and Lenessia were the two I actually recognized (lol) :)

  • It really is interesting! So similar, and yet so different. I used to have little chats with my professor about these differences because he would use words that I normally wouldn't (bacia vs alguidar) or spell something in a different way (humido vs umido, registo vs registro). It was a bit of a learning experience for him as well, since no one else was from...

  • I find it interesting that she mentioned "legal professionals sometimes don’t provide any information ahead of a case". Even when I was doing community interpreting, it was the same way. Agencies never told us details, so we would go in blind.

    I was called to a hospital emergency, thinking it would be something like the need to fill out forms, find out the...

  • St. Jerome (347-420 AD)

    St. Jerome translated the Greek Septuagint into Latin, what was then called the Vulgate, which became the official catholic translation of the Bible. It was also the only translation of the Bible that was available for a millenium!

    Fact: St. Jerome was not perfect. His misinterpretation of a particular word ("keren", which can...

  • I have actually looked into this course, but was unsure if it could be taken fully online, if Portuguese-English was an option for language pair, or if there is a process for assessment of prior learning.

    The link to "Register your interest" takes us back to futurelearn.com/courses/working-with-translation

  • One of the most common complaints of my videogame buddies is "Why can't we have more games with European Portuguese localization? It's always Brazilian Portuguese..." And I have to agree, there are too many cultural differences, which made for interesting discussions.

    We were pretty happy to see Ubisoft use Portuguese voice acting from Portugal in...

  • "When we consider the cultural dimension of communication, we can also see that translation is a layered, complex activity"

    This is exactly why not everyone who is fluent in two languages is automatically qualified to translate/interpret in that language pair and why machine translation still can't replace a good professional.

  • For basic searches, results are about the same.

    The only one that I got that was truly different was searching for "rancho folclórico", which is a term that designates Portuguese traditional dance groups. When searching for "folklore dance groups" it turns out entirely different sets of images, mostly Eastern European, Russian and South American. The first...

  • I noticed it too. Unsure if it had something to do with regional settings, I tried redoing the search while using VPN to change countries... same results. Not much difference in the image searches.

  • I don't see there being much of a difference between the image results, to be honest.

    In Portugal, we would have the same as in Italy. People often have a "bica", the equivalent of espresso in a tiny cup, while at the counter. Frequently, it's accompanied by a traditional pastry (pastel de nata), but it's something that you just drink, eat, exchange a few...

  • Extract 1:

    The Fate of the Fat Scoundrel

    There once was a scoundrel fat slob
    Who grew up quite simple, not prissy
    He learnt how to steal, to pilfer and rob
    Then while drunk he rustled a missy
    But clumsy at fleeing, he sorely failed
    Was soon caught and sent down to jail
    Where his meals were dried beef and bread
    And no wine, but water instead

    I...

  • I already thought MTG cards were works of art and have always loved reading the flavor text. Your comment just gave me a brand new perspective!

  • My cousin built an extensive Manga library starting back in the early 90's. Some of her first books were in French, and she asked me to translate them for her. There were indeed a lot of cultural references!

    While some of the books were published to be read left to right, a few were indeed right to left. I still remember our first time coming across one of...

  • Youtube subtitling is a good way to get used to how it works, I had never done it before and it's pretty straightforward. Upload video to my user account, go to the creation tools, subtitles, and the process is very straightforward. When someone views the video, clicking the CC shows the subtitles.

    I did manage to find a good Portuguese substitute for that...

  • Holy kiss is present in Portuguese translations as well "Saudai-vos uns aos outros com santo ósculo." even though the Latin "osculum pacis" is the kiss of peace. But in mass it was said "Saudai-vos na paz de Cristo" (greet each other in Christ's peace."

    Interesting documentary!

    Having grown up and lived in Portugal, I was used to subtitles and learned...

  • Translation can have a few different definitions:
    - a field of study
    - the product of translating (target text)
    - the process of translating (transposing a text from the source language into the target language)

    What we learned about interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic translation was a brief memory refresher for the first steps of what I've...

  • Impartiality was one of the ethical principles frequently emphasized throughout my interpreting training. From our manual: "Interpreters strive to maintain impartiality by showing no preference or bias to any party involved." We're not there to judge or take sides but to convey the message as it is being said while being as unobtrusive as possible.

    Feeling...

  • In Portuguese, to translate is "traduzir", from the Latin "traducere".
    Traducere = trans (to convert or transfer) + ducere (to lead or guide), so to me, translation seems appropriately named: theories and rules guide a translator to transfer a meaning from one language into another.

  • Without knowing the Babylonian IPA equivalent of what ē, š, ī, â, ā, ṭ and ū sound like, we can't really guess at the right words/syllables to reproduce such sounds. What does the dot under the T mean? Is ē a closed or open vowel? What's the difference between â, ā and a? Is 'šun' pronounced like sun or soon? There are way too many variables to make a single...

  • Actually, the proposed back translation for "S’étonne aux Halles" is completely wrong, because Les Halles was the central Parisian market. So the boy wouldn't be amazed in a hall, he would be in that particular market.

    Also, what I had learned about the expression "un petit d'un petit" aside from the obviously similar sound to "Humpty Dumpty" was that it...