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Localisms
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Author: Marcia R Pinheiro
Australia
English to Portuguese translator
http://proz.com/pro/1580078 
By Marcia R Pinheiro
Published on 12/18/2013
 
Reasons as to why interpreters, and translators will never be replaced by machines.


Linguists get impressed with Localisms: that capability of human beings of continuously innovating in Language.

Maybe converting from one language to another is like putting the dictionary inside of a machine: like magic, all is converted to the target language.

The lexicon brings bread.

That is easy: bread is something that is associated with sandwiches.

There are several types of bread: rye, multigrain, wholemeal, white, and so on.

To the side of complexity, there is unleavened/biblical bread (Crossway Bibles, 2001).

Some groups of people share a secret code, something like a pocket dictionary that they wrote themselves.

There is a place called Rio Grande (Broad River), in the South of Brazil, where they have decided to call our Australian rolls pao particular (pao is bread).

The rest of Brazil thinks that particular means private, and, since private bread does not make sense to those, they would be lost in the bakeries of Rio Grande until a local told them what pao particular is.

If they said cacetinho instead, the seller would be lost in the same manner.

Cacetinho is a localism from Rio de Janeiro, and it means little dick or little baton,.

That is actually the diminutive of cacete, which means dick or baton.

Cacete may also mean boring.

True communication, in human kind, can only be a random process of luck: if the person who receives our message understands what we mean, God was by thereā€¦ .

References:


Crossway Bibles. (2001). Unleavened Bread. Retrieved December 13 2013 from http://www.openbible.info/topics/unleavened_bread









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