Translation Portuguese

The Portuguese – English and English – Portuguese translation is one of the services offered by our translation agency.

Our agency is specialized in the translation from and into Portuguese of all kind of texts and subjects.

The Portuguese translation service is made in two indispensable steps:

Translation phase:

The Portuguese native, professional, translator translates in our agency only into his mother tongue and only texts in which he is specialized.
Latest translation technologies are used in the Portuguese translation, guaranteeing thus the best results.

Proofreading and checking:

To ensure a complete fluency and the best linguistic perfection, in our services agency, every translation from and into Portuguese is proofread and checked by a native translator.

We also localize websites and software from and into Portuguese.

If you need a Portuguese translator, take a try and contact us.

History of the Portuguese language

In 218 BC, the Romans arrived in the Iberian Peninsula, brought with them the Latin language, from which all Romance languages descend. Southern Lusitania was already Romanized in the 2nd century BC. A 1st century Greek geographer, Strabo, remarks in his Geographia “encyclopedia”: “they have adopted the Roman customs, and they no longer remember their own language.” The Portuguese language was spread by arriving Roman settlers, soldiers and merchants, who built Roman cities mostly near the settlements of previous civilizations.

As the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, between 409 A.D. and 711, Germanic peoples conquered the Iberian Peninsula (Migration Period). The newcomers, principally Visigoths and Suevi quickly adopted late Roman culture and the Vulgar Latin dialects of the peninsula. After the Moorish invasion of 711, while Arabic became the administrative language in the conquered regions, most of the people continued to speak a form of Romance, known as Mozarabic. There was a slight influence of the Arabic language on the Romance dialects spoken in the Christian kingdoms of the north was small, affecting mostly their lexicon.

Administrative documents of the 9th century, still interspersed with many Latin phrases are the earliest surviving records of a distinctively Portuguese language. Nowadays, this phase is called Proto-Portuguese (between the 9th and the 12th century). In 1143, the Kingdom of Leon formally recognized Portugal as an independent nation, being Afonso Henriques king. From the 12th to the 14th century, in the first period of Old Portuguese – Portuguese-Galician Period – the language progressively came into general use. The Portuguese language, until that time, had been the language of preference for lyric poetry in Christian Iberia, much like Occitan was the language of the poetry of the troubadors. King Denis created the first Portuguese University in Lisbon (the Estudo Geral) in 1290, and decreed that the Portuguese language, then simply called the “Vulgar language” should be known as the Portuguese language and used officially.

From the 14th to the 16th century, in the second period of Old Portuguese, with the Portuguese discoveries, many regions of Asia, Africa and the Americas took this language. Today, most of Portuguese speakers live in South America and Brazil. It had become a lingua franca in Africa and Asia by the 16th century, used not only for colonial administration and trade but also for communication between local officials and Europeans of all nationalities. Its spread was due to mixed marriages between local people and Portuguese, and also due to its association with Roman Catholic missionary efforts, which led to the formation of a creole called cristão (“Christian”) in a lot of parts of the Asian continent. Until the 19th century, the Portuguese language continued to be spoken in parts of Asia. Some Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal.

The publication of the Cancioneiro Geral de Garcia de Resende, in 1516, was considered as the end of the Old Portuguese period. An increase in the number of erudite words borrowed from Classical Latin and Classical Greek during the Renaissance, which greatly enriched the lexicon, characterized the early times of Modern Portuguese, which spans from the 16th century to present day.