Have a good Christmas break!
Thanks for all your articles. I look forward to reading them during the holidays :-)
Have a good New Year. And look out for the information in Yahoo that I put up about your oral briefings.
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An Inglês Técnico blog
Look, Bill Williams has now started
an Inglês Técnico blog for his students in EST Bareirro. It would be nice to think he was inspired by our blog!
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"apostar" ?
Many students are using "to bet" for the Portuguese word "apostar". People are writing in their TWA that companies are "betting on" innovation to be successful.
In English you "bet" on the horses. You "bet" when you are gambling at the casino.
What companies do is they "invest in" innovation, the don't bet on it.
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Citing websites
I'm worried by the way many students still think that anything that comes from a Website is an authoritative source for their TWA. Many people even think that a commercial site selling an "innovative" service or product is a reliable source for information about innovation.
I think I will dedicate one of our next lessons to analysing Internet sources. And I'll start putting some sites in the sidebar that help you prepare for this.
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A translation experiment on this blog
I have set up the Google automatic translator to translate all the posts on this blog to Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese. Have a look at the translations. I suppose it is possible to make
some sense of the translation ... But I laughed my head off when I saw that Bill's name had been translated to "Conta" in Portuguese.
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Wallet share
I have discovered the word partnership and meaning of "Share of wallet". This is what it says on
BuzzWhack ("dedicated to de-mystifying buzzwords"):
"
wallet share, share of wallet: At some point, trying to increase market share gets expensive. So, companies go after a bigger share of your wallet. Example: Since you can only consume so many colas a day, a soft drink company will try to increase its share of your wallet by selling you peanuts or chips produced by another division of its company."
You can access the
entire BuzzWhack Dictionary from their main page. It could be helpful for other expressions.
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Automatic translators
Some of you have been translating the text about "Brand Wars" (check it out on
our Wiki).
Most of you said that the automatic translator wasn't very helpful as the translation of the text to Portuguese either didn't make sense or looked comic! Let me tell you that each semester I get some very funny translations from students who used an automatic translator for their work. Then they are suprised when I give their work a low mark!
However, IF you are smart and use the translator strategically,
at the same time as your brain, your imagination, the dictionary and your language knowledge, then it can be one more tool to help you to make sense of a text.
Here are two translaters from
Altavista's Babelfish and from
Google's language tools. I'll put these links in the sidebar.
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False friends
Some people were using false friends in their TWA plan. False friends are those words in Portuguese and English that sound the same but mean something different.
"Actual" in Portuguese does NOT mean "actual" in English. And "actualmente" is NOT the same as "actually".
"Pretender" in Portuguese does NOT mean "pretend" in English.
"Assistir" in Portuguese does NOT mean "assist" in English.
If you don't know what they mean you can check out these lists of false friends. There is a
list of Portuguese/English false friends on
"Marco's English Grammar and Testing Page". There is also an excercise to
test your knowledge of false friends. If you are interested, this
list from Wikipedia has common false friends between all languages and English.
I'll also put these links in the sidebar.
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What do these expressions mean?
Someone on the Wiki has asked what these expressions mean:
* Share of Wallet
* Efficient consumer response
* Most Growable Consumer
* Consumer's behaviour
* Cross-selling technologies
I am also curious to know what they mean as I haven't heard most of them. Remind me - is "share of wallet" a direct translation of something like "quota de carteiro"? I'm trying to think of what the equivalent word partnership could be in English.
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