Portuguese passport help for Goans: Translation blues

For every document arriving from Portugal, with reference to the Portuguese passport process, most Goans find themselves in no man's land as far as understanding the matter stated in the document is concerned.

So the lack of knowledge of the Portuguese language has therefore been a big impediment to the speed of the process besides the unnecessary inconveniences caused. Goans who do not understand Portuguese therefore have to scout for the services of someone who can. For the Goans who are stubbornly wedded to their empirical agent of the Portuguese passport, they travel all the way from home to flash that document to him and get an understanding of where their process currently stands or whether they have received a call from the Portuguese consulate in Goa or whether they need to furnish something new.

All these mundane letters which come from Portugal are therefore consuming a lot of time only to be deciphered for meaning. If there was some knowledge of the Portuguese language, such problems would not have been encountered.

However the modern times of the present world help us to solve such small displeasures. In the world where technology is advancing at a fast pace, such irritants of translations of routine documents is possible without the intervention of humans. Goans should therefore use technology to ease themselves out of these small problems which makes them lose their valuable time travelling distances to meet their agents or translators and awaiting his Lordships' audience outside his office doors for hours only to be informed of something having a miniscule importance in the letter.

Here is some advice to get your documents translated free. This method is not foolproof and is to be used best for understanding the letters coming to you from Portugal. This may not be a good idea for documents to be translated for presenting to the Portuguese consulate. For that purpose, human translation services are the best. However for routine documents, the following is quite reliable.

All that I am speaking about here is the "Google translator".For this you need to go to an internet cafe or any internet enabled computer at home or outside. Take your letter from Portugal or any Portuguese document which needs to be translated for your understanding.

Go to MS word or notepad and type the letter .Don't worry about the Portuguese accent of the script while typing. However if you want to be perfect and type exactly as per the Portuguese script with the accents, then click here to understand how to do that.

After typing, click  on the web browser icon, such as internet explorer or mozilla firefox, and a browser window will open. In the web address area, type  google.com and it will take you to the Google homepage as below. Next to the search box on the right you will see 'language tools'. Click on that

You will be taken to a page which will have a window to translate text. Now paste all your Portuguese text which you typed earlier, in this box. Next select language translation from Portuguese to English, which is below the box and click the button "TRANSLATE"

You will see your translated text into English on the right hand side of the text box. It will give you a clear understanding of what the letter from Portugal contains. A sample letter content in translated form is shown in the screen shot below

The Google translator may not be 100% accurate but it can be very very useful to translate from one language to another. As mentioned above, human translation is necessary for important documents because of the context of the text of each document and the Google translator is only to be used for routine translation so that the inconvenience of hunting for a Portuguese translator to translate postal correspondence or any such document is solved.

Hope most of the translation blues of Goans are a thing of the past with this smart lil thing.

For all the posts on this blog relating to the Portuguese passport, CLICK HERE