Fabio M. Said Professional Translation Services - Brazilian Portuguese

Professional Experience

Professional translator for English to Portuguese since 1993. Working especially with finance, quality management, industrial engineering, philosophy and third sector. Several book translations I did in this language combination have been published in Brazil.

Professional translator for German to Portuguese since 1999. Six-year collaboration with sworn translator Osmar Feitoza do Nascimento in Salvador-Bahia, Brazil. Official appointment by the government of Bahia, Brazil, as an ad-hoc sworn translator for German to Portuguese, replacing Mr. Feitoza temporarily in 2002-2003. Both the collaboration and the replacement period enabled me to gather a large terminology background especially in law and business/finance. Several book translations I did in this language combination have been published in Brazil.

Learn more about my professional experience within each one of my specialty areas .

Translator and Language Education

1993 graduate from Colégio Técnico da Fundação José Carvalho, a boarding school in Pojuca-Bahia, Brazil offering high level humanistic and professional education. The four-year, 4,328-hour translation program included:

• linguistics, morphology, stylistics and phonetics of both English and Portuguese languages
• Brazilian, American and English literature (14th-20th centuries)
• practice in specialized translation (industrial engineering, business, tourism/accommodations, mining/mineralogy, IT)
• practice in literary translation
• practice in consecutive interpreting
• compulsory training period as a translator at Cia. Baiana de Pesquisa Mineral, working within the domain of mining and with business correspondence

Languages learned after the initial education as an English-to-Portuguese translator:

• German at Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia (Brazil) and Goethe-Institut Iserlohn (Germany), currently fluent
• Spanish at Sociedad Cultural Caballeros de Santiago, in Salvador-Bahia, currently spoken and written at an intermediate level
• French at Alliance Française Salvador-Bahia, currently spoken and written at an intermediate level

I only work with English and German as source languages, but being a speaker of French and Spanish makes me a better researcher of terminology than most Portuguese translators who work with either German or English as source languages. This means that I can quickly research difficult terms using either French or Spanish as third language for support (but on a specialized level, not the same as people who have only a passing knowledge of such languages), which adds great value to my translation services.

Also after the initial translator education as a translator, I have attended numerous seminars, lectures, conferences and other continuing education opportunities for translators. Learn about the most recent of them on the Events page.

Professional Affiliations

ATA - American Translators Association

DTT - Deutscher Terminologie-Tag e.V.

Some Recent Projects

German to Brazilian Portuguese:

• CORPORATE LAW: Articles of Incorporation of companies within a German group (about 5,000 words)
• CORPORATE LAW: Licensing agreement for designer furniture manufacturing (more than 20,000 words since August 2009)
• BUSINESS/MARKETING: Presentation about German trade fairs (about 3,400 words)
• TRADEMARK LAW: Know-how transfer agreement for beer manufacturing (about 2,700 words)

English to Brazilian Portuguese:

• FINANCE: Paper on the role of insurance in Latin America (about 3,500 words)
• CORPORATE LAW: Share Matching Plan for a large German corporation (about 4,700 words
• BUSINESS/FINANCE: Regular reports/newsletters for a Swiss private banking firm (more than 300,000 words since November 2008
• INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING: Operating manuals for industrial compressors (over 50,000 words)

Hardware / Software

I work on a PC running on 64-bit Windows 7 with 4 GB RAM and a 2 GHz II Dual Core processor.

All my translation work is performed with the help of so-called Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) software, i.e. bundled applications that assist translators in performing common translation tasks such as terminology control, keeping consistency of style and wording, language quality control etc. This means that all texts I translated in the past are stored on my computer and I can resort to them when searching for terminology and style in current translation projects. This also means that in most cases within my areas of specialization I will NOT be handling documents for the first time: I probably have translated similar texts before and therefore my translations - and my customers - will benefit from the experience I have gathered throughout the years.

I am a user of the following CAT tools:

• memoQ translator pro (primary tool since early 2011; great interoperability with other tools)
• Wordfast
• SDL Trados 7

Other tools:

• Microsoft Office 2010 (also Microsoft Office 2003 on a standby computer)
• Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro
• Abbyy Fine Reader 11 (OCR software)
• state-of-the-art grammar/spell checkers: FLiP, Duden Korrektor
• various digital dictionaries, including Creifelds Rechtswörterbuch, Alpman Brockhaus Rechtslexikon, Dicionário Editora inglês-português e português-inglês, Collins English Dictionary and Thesaurus; Merriam-Webster's 11 Collegiate Dictionary, Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa, Novo Dicionário Eletrônico Aurélio etc.
• project management and accounting tools
• various productivity and PC maintenance tools

NEXT: Learn about the translation services that I provide.