Kotro

The mother tongue of over 200 million people throughout the Earth, Portuguese is one of the six or seven most spoken languages in the world, mostly riding on the strenghts of the vast Brazilian population. While its appeal is still mostly localized in medium to small communities, what do you think are its strenghts as a global language? Portuguese is the most widely spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere, and some have conjectured that it could in the future be the lingua franca of that area of the globe. What do you think are the chances of that ever happening? In view of the effort to facilitate Portuguese becoming a more global language, what is your opinion on the recent reforms to make the language, in all it's regional variants, more uniform (at the sake of loosing, for instance, a lot of the Latin roots of European Portuguese). We know that one of the main reasons for the success of the English language is its abbility to constantly adapt - will Portuguese be able to do so, or is it condemned to the same fate as the more conservative French language? If you are learning Portuguese as a second language, in what context do you expect to use it? International business, as is the case with the teaching of the language in many Asian countries, neighbourly familiarity, as might be the case of Spain, Latin America or Sub-saharan Africa, or just hobbyist interest?

Excellent topic, I love a good quote. Here are some of my favourites, mostly from movies or television, I just love a good scripted line (apologies if some are repeated, I may have glanced over a few in this thread): Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants to see us happy (Benjamin Franklin); Destiny may ride with us today, but I see no reason for it to interfere with lunch (Maximilian Schell as Peter the Great); You might very well think that, I couldn't possibly comment (Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart); Heaven preserve us all from Friday night (Ian Richardson as Canon Black); You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays (Robert Preston as Harold Hill) Depravity can be terribly boring if you don't smoke or drink (Audrey Hepburn as Gabrielle Simpson); Puns are the highest form of literature (Alfred Hitchcock); We can co-exist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride (Colossus, The Forbin Project)

Virtue lies in the middle. Doing Translation Studies in college, the first thing I was told was that translating word-for-word was the worst possible way of going at it. On the other hand, full liberty is also ill-advised - you shouldn't be authoring a new text, but adapting an existing one into another language system. Even if he his an old cad, I still follow John Dryden's take on equivalence. His Preface concerning Ovid's Epistles is still my favourite text on Translation Theory, and a model I tend to follow in all my translations. Here it is, if anyone's interested: http://www.bartleby.com/204/207.html

Well, how advanced would you say you are? Dan Brown advanced, or James Joyce advanced? There are different degrees to it...

I love a good British accent, especially the kind coming out of the Public School/Oxbridge system. Hearing someone like Simon Schama or Stephen Fry speaking is just bliss to my ears. Obviously I get some enjoyment out of more peripheral accents, like a Scottish brogue or a strong Aussie accent. I'm not so much amused by broken English or thick foreign accents.

Growing up in Portugal, where there was never a dubbing industry like in other countries (only children's television and movies were dubbed, for obvious reasons), I feel very natural watching a movie with subtitles. I believe watching subtitled image in my formative years was one of the reasons my English became good. Nowdays I can do without subtiles for the languages I understand, but still prefer them when dealing with languages I don't, rather than going for dubbed versions. The thing is, I don't think I get any improvement in those languages from doing so as I did when I was younger with English.