Portuguese Language Blog

While Brazil is the largest Catholic country in the world, there are many other religions represented amongst Brazil’s 190 million people. Catholics now represent about 68 percent of the population, and Evangelical Christians encompass around 20 percent. Evangelical sects are on the rise, including Pentacostalists, Neo-Pentacostalists, Mormons, and others. In fact, Mormonism is one of the fastest growing religions in Brazil:

There are also traditional Protestants, including Lutherans and Episcopalians. Plus, there are around half a million members of the Eastern Orthodox Church, made up of descendants of Middle Eastern, Greek, and Eastern European immigrants. There’s also around 700,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Around 1 percent of the population is Spiritist, a set of beliefs developed by Frenchman Allan Kardec, Brazilian Chico Xavier, and others. Brazil is the only country in the world with a large population of spiritists. Another percentage, less than 1 percent, practice syncretic religions like Candomblé and Umbanda, a mixture of Catholic and African beliefs and traditions. There are also nearly 250,000 Buddhists, many of whom are descendants of Japanese immigrants, and South America’s largest Buddhist temple is located in São Paulo. There are also over 180,000 Jews, many of Eastern European descent, as well as around 150,000 Muslims.

This week, Brazil’s IBGE (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística) released new information about the shifting religious landscape in Brazil. Have a look:

Dictionaries can be helpful when you’re looking for a particular vocabulary word to translate, but another very helpful resource is a bilingual glossary. This means you can find simple translations as well as words unique to each language with a translation and explanation. For example, we don’t have a carteira do trabalho in the US; it requires an explanation that it’s used by workers in Brazil to keep track of employment, and the exact term headhunter doesn’t exist in Portuguese, so there’s an explanation in Portuguese for it.

There are several very helpful glossaries available online for free, so take a look!

Food

Vegetables

Fruit

Food & Cooking

Travel

Travel

Business

Agriculture

Human Resources

Finances, Accounting & Legal

Construction (Click on Glossário, and then on Inglês-Português)

All Topics

Finally, one of the best sites for English-Portuguese glossaries is Proz, used by professional translators. It has dozens of English-Portuguese glossaries, including topics ranging from slang to real estate to IT. Access the full glossary directory here.

Now more than ever, you can find quite a few texts online that are translated in both English and Portuguese. To give a few examples, there’s a limited New York Times syndication on MSN of NYT articles translated into Portuguese, and Paul Krugman‘s blog is syndicated in Portuguese on Estadão. As Adir recommended yesterday, reading as much as possible in Portuguese will help you learn new vocabulary, and it can be helpful to read something you’ve already read in English so you’re familiar with the subject.

Today, we’re going to take a very well-known text – the lyrics from the Brazilian national anthem – and compare it to the English translation. Read both versions to get a sense of the vocabulary, and then read the Portuguese version by itself.

Brazilian National Anthem   -   Hino Nacional do Brasil

After reading both versions, you can listen to the anthem and see the lyrics in both Portuguese and English!