A Widely Spoken Lesser-Taught Language: Portuguese in British Higher Education

This paper sets out to investigate the state of play of Portuguese language education in British Higher Education. Drawing on the cues provided by Portuguese studies lecturer Rhian Atkin in a 2016 talk, I bring together existing data on Portuguese language education in the UK, and promotional and academic discourses on what the Portuguese language is to argue that there is a gap between the fact that Portuguese is one of the most widely spoken languages and its relatively peripheral position in the economy of world languages. This perception gap prevents the development of policies grounded on local realities, and the strengthening of the rationale for the learning of the language.

O Brasil nas Obras de Pero Gândavo e Richard Hakluyt

This study’s aim is to analyze the discursive construction of Brazil in the chronicle of Pero Gândavo, História da Província Santa Cruz que Vulgarmente Chamamos Brasil (1576) and in the travel collection of Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Trafqques of the English Nation (1589-1600). Printed books played a crucial role during the sixteenth century once the editors built a history of the new-found lands in accordance with their reigns’ economic and ideological interests. For Gândavo, the chronicle assured the Portuguese possession over Brazil whereas for Richard Hakluyt, the travel collection denied Iberians’ kings sovereignty over the New World and extolled the English maritime enterprise in the Americas, especially in the lands not effectively colonized by the Iberians. We suggest that the printed book was a stage in which the European countries struggled for the riches of Americas.

Inês de Castro in England

Inês de Castro is the Portuguese character in Portuguese History best known all over the world. Her tragic fate has been told in all kinds of literary forms in practically all European languages. The close connections with England can justify the great number of items we fnd in her literature that we already know. Others may be lost in the countless miscellanea and reviews, where we can eventually trace some text still undiscovered after decades or even centuries.

Gender Indeterminacy in Translation: the Case of R. L. Stine’s Give Yourself Goosebumps Gamebooks via Portuguese Translation

As works of fction, gamebooks offer narrative-bound choices – the reader generally takes on the role of a character inserted in the narrative itself, with gamebooks consequently tending towards being a story told in the second-person perspective. In pursuance of this aim, they can, in some cases, adopt gender-neutral language as regards grammatical gender, which in turn poses a translation challenge when rendering the texts into Portuguese, a language strongly marked by grammatical gender. Stemming from an analysis of a number of gamebooks in R. L. Stine’s popular Give Yourself Goosebumps series, this article seeks to understand how gender indeterminacy (when present) is kept in translation, while examining the strategies used to this effect by Portuguese translators – and particularly how ideas of implied readership come into play in the dialogue between the North-American and Portuguese literary systems.

Landeg White. Ultimatum. A Novel. Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon Press, 2018.

Rewiew to Landeg White. Ultimatum. A Novel.

A Viagem de Anne Seymour Damer a Lisboa (1790-1791) e a Representação de Portugal Pitoresco, Católico e Sentimentalista como Espaço de Convalescença e Aprendizagem em Belmour (1801) e na Correspondência da Escultora

In 1790-1791, the British sculptor Anne Seymour Damer (1749-1828) travels to Lisbon for health reasons. Damer describes the picturesque city and its environs in several letters to her friends back home, and she starts her novel Belmour (1801) in the Portuguese capital. This article analyses the realistic representation of Lisbon (as a place of recovery) and Sintra (as a space of evasion and sentimental learning) – through themes and narrative strategies such as religion, health recovery, the cultural Other and ethnographic and historical landscapes – in both the author’s letters and novel, which echo several contemporary British travel narratives about Portugal.

“The Red Plague Rid You For Learning Me Your Language!” – Standard and Non-Standard Use in English and in Portuguese

This paper examines how non-standard British English is translated into European Portuguese with a view to understand the social attitudes and ideologies embedded in standard and non-standard European Portuguese. It focuses on a small corpus of literary works which resort to non-standard language as a fundamental linguistic trait of characters’ identity or plot in order to establish whether there were any successful attempts to maintain the deviation from standard in the target language. The paper fnds that the task of translating non-standard is ideologically charged insofar as it is mediation between normalised and non-normalised realities, very often requiring the specifc indexing of linguistic markers to particular social groups. The sensitivity involved in this process may explain why most translations examined, although able to render non-standard features in the target language to some extent, kept a closer proximity to standard language than the source texts. In view of this, most translations examined are imbued with an ideological thrust in favour of standard language.

Joyce Carol Oates Traduz um Autor Português: Ela Própria

In the beginning of the seventies Joyce Carol Oates published a pseudo translation from the Portuguese of Portugal called The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories From the Portuguese (1975) which was composed during the writing of her novel Wonderland (1971). Various critics have written about this Oates’ reverie, raising problems and questions. We will explore the two most important of its stories not only to understand the reason of the appearance of this book, but also to look at Oates besiegement and use of a pseudonym, to draw a parallel with Fernando Pessoa. This article aims to highlight the book most important issues taking into account the relationship between Portugal and the United States and the way they draw attention to new problems and questions, thus hoping to contribute to new research in Anglo-Portuguese studies.

Salazar, London and the Process of European Integration up until the Signing of the Treaty of Rome

This article aims to shed some light on the political and ideological agendas of both London and Lisbon during the process leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Rome, on 25 March 1957. It focuses on four main questions. The frst one is on how the colonial issue still influenced their attitudes towards the process of European integration. The second one explores how the risks of isolation conditioned their understanding of the commercial and economic potential of a European common market. The third question addresses their inability to identify themselves with the principles and values of the European project. The fourth one seeks to ascertain the views exchanged between the British and Portuguese governments on issues such as the customs union, the common market and the free trade area.

“Anti-Slave Trade Cruzader”: Lord Holland’s Contribution to the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Impact on the Anglo-Portuguese Political and Diplomatic Relations

This article investigates the role of Lord Holland in the abolition of the Slave Trade and in the enforcement of abolition on other nations. Holland, nephew of Charles James Fox, was the embodiment of Whig idealism, yet there was ambiguity in his position. In the frst place much of Holland’s income came from a sugar plantation in Jamaica so that his support for the abolition of slavery itself was highly qualifed. Secondly, Holland was an ardent lusophile and British attempts to suppress the Portuguese Slave Trade produced strains in an alliance that had lasted since the fourteenth century.