As a translation company, one of ITC’s objectives is to promote exchange and communication through linguistic diversity by offering multilingual translation services. That’s why ITC Group works with professional and experienced Portuguese translators to provide our clients with Portuguese translation services of the highest quality while satisfying their expectations and complying with their requests and instructions.
Portuguese developed in the western Iberian Peninsula from the Latin spoken by Roman soldiers and settlers in the third century BC. Ancient Portuguese, also known as Galician-Portuguese, distanced itself from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions in the fifth century. By the 13th century, Galician-Portuguese had become a language in its own right with its own literature and began to separate into two distinct languages.
Portugal was officially recognized as an independent entity in 1143 by the Kingdom of León, which thus became part of Galicia, of which King Afonso Henriques was the first king. In 1290, King Diniz created the first Portuguese university in Lisbon (the Estudo Geral) and decreed that the language of the Portuguese, simply called the “vulgar language” at the time (i.e., vulgar Latin), should henceforth be called “Portuguese” and be used all the time to replace Latin.
The expansion of ancient Portuguese was marked by the significant colonization efforts of Portuguese colonizers in the 15th and 16th centuries. At that time, merchants, religious missionaries and colonizers contributed greatly to the development of the language as they took over countries in Africa, Asia and the two Americas. Today, most people who speak Portuguese live in Brazil, a former Portuguese colony.
There is a community of Portuguese-speaking countries (whose Portuguese acronym is CPLP) which includes eight Portuguese-speaking countries that have adopted Portuguese as their official language: Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Portuguese is also one of the official languages of Macao, China.
According to UNESCO estimates, Portuguese is one of the fastest growing European languages after English. In addition, this language has great potential for growth as an international language in South Africa and South America.
Portuguese spelling is based on the Latin alphabet and uses the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde and the cedilla to designate accentuation, vowel pitch, nasalization, as well as other sounds. Accented letters and digrams are not counted as separate characters.
The Portuguese alphabet does not include the letters k, w, or y. These letters are only used in words of foreign origin such as the word “whiskey.”
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