4-99 (December 1999) by Delio Destro Special Aspects Brazil

In a few weeks the Brazilian Congress should be voting a new law designed to control the use of foreign terms in the country. The idea is to keep the "potentially dangerous" cultural colonialism out of our daily life. The law stands a good chance of being approved.

Even though one may argue that it is one of the roles of congress to defend our cultural heritage, I dread any state interference that aims to control speech, no matter how well intentioned the legislator may be. Furthermore, if it is approved and enforced, this law would certainly pose tremendous challenges to the technical writing and translation community.

The reason I am writing about such a regional problem is the perception that this is not a regional problem at all. Some of my German colleges fight everyday with the option of abandoning a sometimes extremely more precise German term to adopt a more marketing correct English one. And the French, sometimes compelled by law to use a French term, wish they could have more freedom to choose a more suitable (once again) English term.

The possibility of this law in Brazil opens to the society the opportunity to discuss the real issues (and there are plenty of issues) of cultural colonialism.

The whole drive today seems to be against English. More often than not, American English. Every time "Language Invasion" is brought about, words like Shopping Center, Marketing and Disk Drive are mentioned. There is always a bias against the almighty USA and, one may confess, a bit of envy that "those guys can force on us" so much of their language. The fact is: they don't force anything on us. We, the colonized, happily welcome a language that can bring us more wealth and the freedom to work with other people. The temptation to adopt an equalizer is too great to be ignored. I don't remember anybody telling their kids to learn English well because that would open the possibility to read Emerson or Dickens in their native prose. Most of the people I know tell their kids to do it because "you will be dead out there without English".

Frankly, I doubt too many people would be reading this article if it were in Portuguese, my mother language.

Having said that, this is no excuse for the fact that we adopt foreign words because they are more fashionable. (Like we used to do with French terms at the turn of the last century.) To adopt a word because it makes (or you think it makes) your product or service more attractive is downright dumb. Customers with a little better than average perception will realize you are trying to, as the Americans say, take them for a ride. Most of the time they will, even unconsciously, dump your solution in favor of a more honest one. At the same time, keeping everything under the mother language umbrella will cause a similar effect.

Back in the 70s, a microelectronics professor at the University of São Paulo wrote a number of books in his field using only Brazilian Portuguese terms, even creating those that did not exist in our language. The books were very good for he really knew about his field. However, they were unreadable. Very soon, the underground student groups were circulating a "Guide to Understanding Prof. X Books" where a "UCP" was translated into a CPU, a "Barra Onibus" was renamed a Bus Bar, etc.

I believe technical writers and translators should focus on the real needs of their customers. Any attempt to go either way by force of law, internal regulations, or nationalistic feelings that do not reflect reality would be as damaging as adopting foreign, synthetic words for fashion.

In the end, all our customers want is to read what we write and to understand it. This is the bottom line. All the rest is, in my mind, cultural rhetoric, because if the end customer does not understand us, it does not really matter what language we write it in.

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