By Catherine Howard, PLD Copyeditor
For our Distinguished Speaker at the ATA Conference in New Orleans (October 24–27, 2018), PLD has the great honor of hosting Marco Neves, a prominent translator, language expert, and author from Portugal. He will be presenting a double session relevant to all translators interested in Portuguese and language diversity, entitled “How to Deal with Portuguese-Language Varieties: A Translator’s View,” parts I and II (Saturday, 2:00–3:00, 3:30-4:30). The session will be presented in Portuguese and cover many variants of the language, even within each country. Marco has written extensively about differences and similarities in the Portuguese spoken in Portugal, Galicia, Brazil, Macau, a tiny Caribbean island, and elsewhere. Translators who work from or into Portuguese of one country may discover valuable ways they can expand their business by learning other variants—besides being entertained by Marco’s delightful way of instructing through story-telling.
Marco brings rich experience to the banquets he lays out on the translating table: as summed up in one site, “He has seven jobs, all directed toward language: translator, reviewer, professor, reader, conversationalist, and author. That’s not seven? There’s one more: he’s also a father, with the job of telling stories.”
In more detail, Marco has been a professional translator since 2002 and the manager at the agency Eurologos-Lisboa since 2006; he teaches translation practice and technology at NOVA University of Lisbon, as well as on-site and online courses on translation project management, memoQ, and “intelligent writing”; and he was president of APET (Portuguese Association of Translation Companies) from 2015 to 2018. In his intriguing blog Certas Palavras: Linguas, Livros e Outras Viagens, he writes fascinating posts about adventures in language, playful comparisons of terms in different Portuguese dialects, stories of the history of Portuguese, or the latest book he’s savoring. He often tries to dispel prejudices against different variants of Portuguese and is not shy about bringing up controversial issues like the Acordo Ortográfico or the politics of Galician spelling. Although many blogs have suffered declining reader commentary in recent years, Marco’s wide readership in Portugal, Galicia, and Brazil still carry on lively discussions over every weekly post—and even nominated his blog to compete for the Prémio Blogs do Ano 2018. With a gift for communicating arcane linguistic data in everyday language and a flair for story-telling, he has written four lively books on language, often using a fictional framework to present his information: Doze Segredos da Língua Portuguesa (2016), A Baleia Que Engoliu um Espanhol (2017), A Incrível História Secreta da Língua Portuguesa (2017), and José Cardoso Pires e o Leitor Desassossegado (2018). Their popular success has led him to receive many invitations for interviews in Portuguese TV and radio shows. Here is a sampling of a few:
- TV segment about the launch of “Incrível História de Portugues”
- TV interview (Canal Q)
- One-hour radio interview about “Doze Segredos da Língua”
So come share Marco’s passion for Portuguese in all its varieties and find out how it affects translation at ATA NOLA on Saturday from 2 to 3 PM and 3:30 to 4:30 in Studio 8, “How to Deal with Portuguese-Language Varieties: A Translator’s View.” See you there!
Catherine V. Howard, PhD, specializes in translating texts on social research from Portuguese, French, and Spanish into English. Some recent books include The Fortress of Salvador in Colonial Brazil (2014) and chapters in Capturing Imagination (2018). She is also a long-time fan of Marco Neves’s blog, Certas Palavras.
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