International Railroad Discussion > Need help translating Brazilian Portuguese into English

Hello there Bilingual Narrow Gauge Railfans,

Ever know what it is like to aline yourself with a small group of people with a very good idea to save railroad history and equipment and want to help them alot and want to scream out to the world the virtue of their work? Well I have joined and am helping the IFPPC, but I know a really important part of letting the world know about their work is to translate it into english language. I can but am too slow to do this right.

I am trying to work to extend my work contract here in Brazil so that I can help them longer from here but don't not have enough time to do the work that I know they need, which is to translate everything of their website and newsletters into english to help make their work transparent to the world wide web community.

So my request to those people out there that understand Portuguese and can write good english, could you help us finish translating all the website and newsletters (3x) to english? From my bad translation skills that there is 15hr of work to translate from machine translations into readable english of all current work. Then in the future about every 2-3 months there will be a new newsletter or bulletins to translate.

Please help, no stress, fica frio, tudo bem

Thor

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrovia_Perus-Pirapora
http://www.geocities.com/perus_pirapora/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4517922508343426393

http://efpp.fotopic.net/c1641807.html
http://www.perus.com/index.php?pagina=30
http://o-resgate.blogspot.com/2006/11/estrada-de-ferro-perus-pirapora.html
http://www.geocities.com/estrada_de_ferro/efpp.htm

Thor:

Here's a link to an online translator that I use all the time.

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt

It translates literally, but not colloquially, so translating from the written Portuguese you'll get a very stilted English version. It'll be up to you to make it into colloquial English, but this will give you a good a start.

Here's how the first paragraph of the first linked item you provided translated into English:


"Turkey railroad is situated in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The railroad had initiated the operations in 1914 with the intention to carry whitewash produced in the quarter Black Cat, city of Cajamar, to the tracks of the São Paulo Railway - SPR in the quarter of Turkeys, city of São Paulo. The concession for construction of the railroad was gotten in 1910 by Silvio De Campos, Mari W. Tibiriçá and Clemente Neidhardt. The form to obtain the concession was the creation of a project of transport for the romeiros until the city sanctuary of Pirapora of the Good Jesus, therefore the authorities of the time never would go to only approve the construction of a railroad of 20Km for the transport of the whitewash, the branch that would make the linking until Pirapora never left the paper. In 1925 the Brasilian Portland Cement was established, first cement plant of Brazil, established in the quarter of Turkeys. In 1951 railroad, plant and quarries had been bought by Group JJ Abdalla that operated ties 1974, when the complex were interdicted for the government. The railroad lost its basic function, therefore the branch never ties Pirapora left the paper and the service of transport of passengers already had been locked up in 1972."

Hope this will help.

Fritz in Huntsville, AL, USA

Hello Thor,

I will be glad to help out as best I can. I can certainly write reasonably good English (definitely better than what can be obtained from the online translators!), but I may need some help on some of the Brasilian colloquial expressions, such as "romeiros" (used in the E.F. Perus-Pirapora Wikipedia article). My interpretation of "romeiros", in the context of this article, would be itinerant tradesmen/salesmen who would travel to Pirapora to sell food, etc., to the pilgrims attending religious festivals at the Pirapora shrine (or maybe even the pilgrims themselves) -- but I am not quite sure of this! My native languages are English and Spanish (I was born and educated in Argentina, but my grandparents were English), and I learned Brasilian Portuguese through close contact with the staff of the Brasilian subsidiary of my former employer; so I can speak it quite fluently, and read/translate it quite well -- but please don't ask me to *write* Portuguese correctly ;-).

I have only one small problem -- I am currently on vacation, and will probably not have much time to do any translating until after the 22nd of this month; then, if I am not able to finish by the 11th of July, I will again be busy until about the 17th of August. If you and your friends can "live with that", I will be most happy to help. If I have a some time later today, I will try to do one of the articles linked to your post, and post it here for all to see, so that Trainorders readers can tell us if I am doing OK.

Roger Lewis (airbrakegeezer)

Thor and Trainorders readers, attached (I hope!) is a translation of the article posted on the "Portal de Perus" webpage. I did not try to include the photos, because there are no captions to translate, so they can simply be viewed on the website.

Thor, please consider this as my authorization for the IFPPC, or, for that matter, any other Brazilian railfan/cultural/nonprofit organization, to use this translation as they see fit, for the benefit of those organizations.

As a friend and former colleague, stationed in Brasil for several years in the late '50s-early '60s, often says: "Tudo azul, ainda com balinhas brancas".

Best Regards,

Roger Lewis (airbrakegeezer)

Estrada de Ferro Perus-Pirapora
(Perus-Pirapora Railroad)

Although only 2 of the 21 kilometers (1.2 of 13 miles) of the railroad have so far been restored to service, this old Smokey Mary* has already become a tourist attraction.

Now, thanks to the donation of 3500 sleepers (ties) by the Companhia Paulista de Trens Metropolitanos (CPTM/Sao Paulo Metropolitan Trains Co.), the Railroad and Cultural Resources Institute (IFPPC) is set to restore another 6 kilometers (4 miles) of the railroad.

There are 21 locomotives on the property, but “Princesinha” (“Little Princess”), a steam locomotive built by the French manufacturer Decauville Ainé**, is the only one so far restored to operating condition, at the end of last year.

The master plan encompasses a tourist and environmental attraction train running from km 1.5, in Perus, to km 15, in Cajamar; there are to be eight stations. A museum and butterfly park are to be built, along with visitor reception areas, a snack shop and restaurant.

For the moment, only group visits are permitted. Non-profit and commercial organizations and schools can arrange tours by email at peruspirapora@yahoo.com.br .

Translator's notes:

*“María Fumaça” (“Smokey Mary”) is an affectionate Brazilian nickname for any old steam locomotive, like “Old Smokey” or “Smokey Joe” in the USA.

**The firm is actually Decauville, the largest French builder of small industrial locomotives, narrow-gauge industrial and military railroad equipment; “Ainé” is apparently the specific plant that built the locomotive.

Hey Roger,

Thanks for answering my/our call for help. I too am still trying to learn Portuguese, but I have gotten myself into so many projects that I can't do all that I'd like too. Our main organizer, guiding light and all around good guy is Julio Moraes, gentlemen please shake hands.

I have started with the translation of the newsletters, there are now three, in that I have translated them per machine at work and started working the English around so that it reads well. The newsletters are being written in a somewhat elevated tone of language so that the translation programs sometimes get lost in the Grammar, so that it is good to be able to read the original Portuguese to see if you get the meaning correct.

www.peruspirapora.com

I don't know why the website of our association doesn't come up right now, but we really need to get it translated into English as well. I'm not sure who is the webmaster but we will have to have Julio introduce us. We also desperately need to include page numbers on our newsletter, I have a mess when I print them out for reading and translating.

Roger do you know anything about authoring pages on wikipedia, if we can write something in English I'll translate it into German, maybe you could translate it into Spanish? We need to get some more info out there too. News travels fast on the Internet as you can see from the from the postings below, many, many people read posts at the newsgroups but few answer. Our very small organization (6-8 people) is getting ready for some big undertakings and considering that we have no real money it is daunting.

We are entering into a very interesting time as we are going to get ready to move all the 17 steam engines and other equipment to one isolated area, we are trying to get some companies like mine, Robert Bosch, and the trade schools to restore a diesel engine for us and we are trying to prepare for limited tourist operation of the line. All very exciting news that needs to be told, as well as a small plea for monetary donations from anywhere in the world.

So Roger, I'd like to send you the first newsletter "Boletim" to see what you can do with the files depending on your vacation and other commitments. I copied them down into text as the translation program we have at work only does text, doc or html and I copied it from the original pdf, I'm getting a copy of the original word doc so that we can re-insert the English, in the next mail.

Thanks again for your willingness to help.

warm regards
Thor (windbergs@yahoo.com)

PS I just tried to upload the docs and even wanted to upload Google earth links but this site only allows jpgs...you'll have to back channel me, please.

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