Language is an ever-evolving field, so often native speakers have to face some linguistic changes. And Portuguese is now a good example of this. For the past few years, all the Portuguese speaking countries have been dealing with the adoption of the new spelling rules.
Signed in 1990, in Lisbon, the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement was established with the main purpose of unifying the orthography for the Portuguese language, within all the countries which have Portuguese as their official language.
With this reform established between the Lisbon Science Academy and the Brazilian Academy of Letters, a long and complex process begun. Only recently the implementation was completed within the Portuguese education system. Defended by many and criticized by many others this spelling reform is still a controversy issue for the Portuguese speakers.
Nonetheless, the process is moving forward and obviously the terminology database of the European Union couldn’t let these changes out of the term data base. For that reason, during the past few months, the IATE team, which included a Portuguese trainee, along with the CdT (Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union) and the Portuguese Translation Unit, have been introducing the changes according to this reform.
The main purpose is to adjust all the terms with Portuguese equivalents, in line with the defined spelling rules Nonetheless, we’re talking about 9.000 terms and some of them might have escaped from our “hawk-eyes”, during the process. So, if you find some terms that are not in compliance with the Portuguese spelling reform, please let us know. Just send us an e-mail (dgtrad.termcoord@europarl.europa.eu) with all the terms that should be corrected and with the new spelling form.
Article written by Júlia de Sousa, former trainee at TermCoord