Brazilian oil industry and the translation industry
jan 24 2024
Today, in Brazil, the oil industry poses a strong demand for translation services.
— What services are needed?
The largest oil enterprise in Brazil is Petrobras, which purchases high volumes of products and services in the global market. These commercial ageements usually require that the technical documentation be delivered in Portuguese.
And, if the company has offices in Brazil, its management documents and software systems must be in Portuguese, as well as its institutional communication items, such as websites, marketing documents, and advertisement pieces.
All these requirements involve a large volume of translation into Portuguese.
— And how is this translation to Portuguese done?
Typically, technology companies contract multilingual translation agencies based in the United States or Europe to perform translations into all the languages they need.
The hired multilingual agency has its vendors specialized in various languages spread across the entire globe. In the case of Portuguese, it will probably use the services of a Brazilian translation company.
The multilingual agency runs the initial processing of the material in its translation memory platform (see our article on translation memory) and then send the processed material to its Brazilian vendor, who opens the file in the translation environment of the platform, revises the segments already contained in the memory and translate the new segments.
The Brazilian vendor returns the translation to the multilingual agency, who exports the material to the final format and delivers it to the equipment manufacturer. Then, the translated material is included in the product package delivered to the client (in our example, Petrobrás).
— Is this work flow the same for other advanced technology companies, such as producers of software and electronic equipment for the consumer market?
More or less. The method is basically the same, but there is one important difference: a consumer software or electronics company sells its products across the entire world. So, these companies will ask the multilingual agency to translate their materials into dozens of languages, such as French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Polish, Chinese, etc.
In the case of equipment for the oil industry, sales are not so distributed. A company of this area can make an important sale to Petrobras alone, for instance, thus needing translation only to Portuguese. This creates another possibility: instead of using a multilingual agency, the manufacturer may work directly with a Brazilian translation agency. But it has to choose well to guarantee a high-quality job.
The best option is a company that has experience in partnering with multilingual agencies, because that will mean it follows the best methods and uses the best tools, delivering a world-class job at a lower cost.
Marcos Chiquetto is an engineer, Physics teacher, translator, and writer. He is the director of LatinLanguages, a Brazilian translation agency specialized in providing multilingual companies with translation into Portuguese and Spanish.
