German-Portuguese Translations by Experienced, Native-Speaker Translators

Portuguese

Language combinations for translations involving Portuguese:

  • Portuguese to German
  • German to Portuguese
  • English to Portuguese
  • Portuguese to English

Eisenmann Übersetzungsteam provides technical translations by native speakers of Portuguese into and from Portuguese for all subject areas: economics, law, technology, medicine, advertising, IT etc.

Our subject areas range from finance to law, from technology to advertising, websites, certificates and references.

All texts are translated by experienced specialist translators of Portuguese into their mother tongues (Portuguese or German), as per the native speaker principle.

The minimum price for a translation is €30, excluding VAT.

The Spread of Portuguese

Portuguese belongs to the Indo-European group of the Romance branch of language, and together with Spanish and Catalan forms the Ibero-Romance languages. Just like Galician, spoken in northwest Spain, Portuguese can be traced to the original Galician-Portuguese language which developed between ancient times and the Early Middle Ages. After the rise of a Portugal independent of Spain, both of today’s languages developed.

Portuguese is spoken by approx. 190 million native speakers, living in for example Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Timor-Leste, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, Namibia, São Tomé and Principe, India, South Africa and Spain.

Add in the people who speak Portuguese as a second language, and we get approx. 200 million speakers worldwide.

Portuguese is an official language in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe, Timor-Leste and Macau.

The History of Portuguese

For a long time, Portuguese only existed as a spoken language, while people used Latin when writing. Although the land which today makes up Portugal was inhabited before the arrival of the Romans, 90% of the Portuguese vocabulary stems from Latin, and there are now very few traces of the original language to be found.

The earliest records of a written form of Portuguese are "Cancioneiros" from the year 1100. Like Spanish, Portuguese was influenced by the Germanic invasions which took place from the 5th Century onwards, and by the Moorish invasion of 711.

The Germanic elements entered Portuguese in two ways: indirectly as borrowed Germanic words which had become part of the colloquial Latin spoken by Roman legionaries on the Iberian Peninsula, and directly as borrowed words of Gothic and Suebian origins.

The Arabic influence can mainly be traced to the status of Arabic as an administrative language in the conquered areas of the Iberian Peninsula. However, the population continued to speak in its Romance dialect, causing the influence of Arabic on Portuguese not to be very strong, yet some lexical structures still link to Arabic. Thus, some words in modern Portuguese are of Arabic origin, mainly from the fields of food and agriculture, since the Arabs brought such innovations with them.

After the formation of the independent Kingdom of Portugal in 1139, Portuguese gradually became a written language. By the 14th Century, Portuguese was already a developed language with a rich literary tradition, and in the 15th Century, as Portugal began to slowly build its colonial empire up until 1975, Portuguese began to spread across the globe.

The Portuguese colonial empire stretched from Brazil to Macau in China. In the 16th Century, Portuguese was the lingua franca in Africa and Asia, where it served not only for colonial administration but also for trade and communication between the rulers and Europeans of all nationalities. This is the reason why Portuguese today is an official language in several independent states, and why so many people speak it as a second language.

Alongside Portuguese proper, there are around 20 Creole languages which are mostly based on Portuguese.

Portuguese became a significant minority language in several states in Western Europe and North America due to emigration out of Portugal over the past few centuries.

Language Variants of Portuguese

Portuguese native speakers mostly do not call their dialects as such, rather as accents (“sotaques”) or pronunciations (“pronúncia”), because the term 'dialect' has derogatory connotations in Portuguese.

Standard Portuguese - also known as Estremenho – has changed more over the course of history than other language variants. Nowadays, there are generally considered to be two forms of standard Portuguese; standard Portuguese from Portugal, so-called European Portuguese – often the language of choice in Portugal’s earlier African colonies - and standard Portuguese from Brazil. However, there are generally considered to be four standard pronunciations of Portuguese: those of Coimbra, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. These four forms are the most influential pronunciation forms.

Portuguese is an official language of the European Union, Mercosul, the African Union and several other organisations. The significance of Portuguese has increased tremendously in recent decades, and Portuguese enjoys constantly increasing popularity in many countries.

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