Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe
When considering the truly global languages, one can easily overlook Portuguese, often overshadowed in the world’s classrooms by Spanish. Yet the Portuguese language is nothing if not global – apart from having official status in Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia, there are over 220 million native speakers, making it sixth among languages in terms of number of speakers.
A close relative of Spanish, the two languages are to a good degree mutually intelligible, with some putting the percentage of lexical similarity* as high as 89%. This is certainly the case in writing, where the difference between the two Romance languages becomes minimal, as a majority of the written forms and vocabulary, even the grammar, are similar.
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* In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 100% would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0% would indicate that they have no words in common.
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‘The sweet and gracious language’ (Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote) among the Romance languages, it has contributed a great deal of vocabulary to other languages such as Afrikaans, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Bengali, and Hindi. The first dictionary of Japanese in a European language (1603) was written in Portuguese, and the modern orthography of Vietnamese, whose written form previously relied on Chinese characters, is based on 17th-century Portuguese. The first ever Chinese dictionary in a European language was also a dual language book with Portuguese as the other language.
Spectrum Translation has specialized in Portuguese since 2004. We have translated and localized Portuguese for both Portugal and Brazil, and translated texts from Macau, Angola, and Mozambique.
We welcome your queries regarding successful translation, proofreading, and editing in this international language.