The Ccaps Answer to the New Brazilian Portuguese Spelling
Posted in February 27th, 2009 by Fabiano CidYou may have already heard that the eight Portuguese-speaking countries signed a new Orthographic Agreement and that Brazil is at the forefront of its implementation, official as of January 1, 2009. We had even mentioned the end of the dieresis here at the Ccaps Blog…
This generated a lot of questions among buyers and vendors of language services as to whether to use the new spelling and how to adapt to the new rules. Reasons given for not using the new orthographic rules range from doubts among academics associated with certain terms to the lack of a reliable spellchecker that can be used with the most widely used word processor, namely Microsoft Word.
Even if you decided to change to the new spelling, how would you deal with legacy material? After all, you have been translating your company material into Brazilian Portuguese for years and probably have it stored in the form of translation memories, content management systems or the like.
Translation memories pose a more difficult question, since you would have to completely review your discounts for fuzzy matches, 100% matches and in-context (a.k.a. XTranslate or ICE) matches. All legacy material would have to be thoroughly reviewed not only to comply with the new orthographic rules, but mostly to avoid mixing new and old spellings in the same document that could leverage previously translated texts.
With this in mind, we decided to create a simple yet highly effective process to avoid such costs and headaches for you: The Ccaps New Brazilian Spelling TM Compliance Tool. This tool was created by the Ccaps language and engineering teams to adapt Brazilian Portuguese words to the new spelling rules in exported translation memory files. New versions of the tool will allow the checker to be used in other document formats (such as .tmx, .tbx, .html, .xml, etc.)
This is a value-added service that will be provided free by Ccaps. Follow this link to download the tool and the user guide explaining how it should be used.
We could not forget to send a special thanks to Renato Beninatto, from Common Sense Advisory, who inspired us to create the tool and who, as usual, started the discussion on this topic ahead of everyone in the industry. He even published a post on the Global Watchtower about our tool. Check it out!
Yet one serious doubt remains: should we change our address to “Rua da Assembleia”? Being a proper name, should it remain as is or should the accent be removed since “assembleia” is a common noun? We are open for discussion… 
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