The a folha magazine is a translation and writing resource edited by the Portuguese Units of the European Institutions and available in the Portuguese language.
The topics covered are mostly related to the field of languages, culture and terminology. They can approach Portuguese linguistics from an international point of view, but also from unique approaches of a large diversity of cultures. The magazine is a reliable and diverse source of information where subjects such as the following are debated: Portuguese – Spanish false friends, list of European institutions, New Orthographic Rules for Portuguese, IATE approach, translation from a European point of view, as well as researches concerning linguistic particularities of other countries (Designações de entidades associadas à Alcaida).
Romania – country file, published in number 47 of the bulletin, is an article that follows a pre-defined structure used for similar articles in the previous numbers of the publication about various countries such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland. The article provides an IATE entry where the public can access the terminological file in the EU languages.
The first part is based on a geographic and economical analysis, mentioning data such as capital, currency, main cities, rivers and mountains. This introduction is followed by 3 tables that present specific topics in a multilingual outlook (Romanian, Portuguese and English). The items are: Administrative subdivisions of the country, Regions and Organization of justice. All terms treated in these sections are connected to an IATE ID, when applicable, and each section mentions the data source.
An interesting item is the transliteration field which provides the conversion of a text from one script to another. This is a challenging exercise that provides useful results, since the phonetics and phonology are aspects specific to each family of language, language or dialect. Lately this exercise is common in the translation process of the EU institutions, therefore the files can also be used for translation purposes. Generally, it is not always possible to find the corresponding phonemes in another language. However, this study manages to give the most perfect and closest equivalents in Portuguese.
You can see some particular characteristics of the Romanian phonology in the following examples:
| It is possible to consult the complete magazine via this link.
Lately, a folha is meant to be a quarterly publication accessible in a paper form, as well as in an electronic form. By Mioara Stroe terminology trainee at Termcoord. |