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Localisation in Brazil

José Eduardo De Lucca gives an insight into the developing role of software localisation in Brazil.

By José Eduardo De Lucca

Originally published in March 2005 issue of Localisation Focus. To learn more about Localisation Focus, click here.

Brazil’s population of 180 million people speak a variation of Portuguese that is conventionally called Brazilian Portuguese in the world of localisation. The Brazilian variant is considerably different from the Continental Portuguese language (spoken in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Principe, Timor, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau). There are orthographic, grammatical and semantic differences and products localised to the Portuguese of Portugal are not accepted here and the reverse is also true. Within Brazil there is an undeniable linguistic unity, generated by the strong influence of the mass media, which is very present in the daily lives of the population.

Brazil has developed a national software market that is relatively strong for its size and level of economic development when compared to other countries. This means that Brazil is among the world’s 10 largest software markets. According to a September 2003 report from MIT, “Slicing the Knowledge-based Economy in Brazil, China and India: a Tale of 3 Software Industries” (which can be found at the site www.softex.br), software sales in India were US$ 8.2 billion including US$ 6.22 billion in exports. In China the software industry had sales of US$ 7.4 billion of which US$ 400 million were exports in 2001 and Brazilian software sales totalled US$ 7.7 billion with only US$ 100 million in exports. Brazil imports between US$ 1.5 – US$ 2 billion dollars worth of software per year. This demonstrates the existence of a Brazilian software industry that supplies solutions to the domestic market and that can hope to reach the foreign market.

Due to the volume, it is natural that many companies supply localisation services into Brazilian Portuguese. They are usually small SLVs (single language vendors) based in Brazil that generally supply services to large multinational MLVs (multilanguage vendors).

Although it has a reasonably sized IT market, the domestic rate of digital inclusion in Brazil is small: less than 10% of homes have computers. For this reason the government is developing programs to facilitate access to computers and their purchase by the low-income population. It is hoped that these programs will stimulate the entrance to the market of an additional 1 million personal computers per year. Both in the government sector as well as in these actions for digital inclusion, the current policy is to provide incentives to the adoption of free and open source software, which should be completely localised into Brazilian Portuguese (since language is a tremendous barrier, particularly among the lower classes). Brazilian groups for the localisation of free and open source software are very active and enthusiastic, but these products are still lacking in final quality.

Other government actions should also impact the localisation sector in a unique manner. In 2004, the Brazilian government defined software as an absolute priority within its export development policy. Significant investments are being made to prepare software companies to make the export of software products and services viable. This positioning creates a natural demand for localisation services, but with a peculiarity: the software developed here should be translated and localised from Brazilian Portuguese into foreign languages and locales. This is not a common practice in the world of localisation – perhaps because of the lack of a software exporting tradition in Brazil – and represents an important opportunity for the sector. There is also a tremendous shortage of software professionals who are capable of designing and developing software that is properly internationalised. For this reason, the government has invested in professional training in aspects of software internationalisation and localisation, under the responsibility of the Centro GeNESS, which plans to educate professionals and keep the Brazilian software industry informed about technology, standards, products and services linked to software localisation and internationalisation.

To sum up, the Brazilian market will continue to be of interest to the localisation sector, and should have constant growth, because the economy as a whole is growing. The localisation of free and open source software should also continue to grow as a consequence of the country’s needs and trends. To the degree in which Brazilian software begins to be exported in a consistent manner, opportunities will expand for suppliers of localisation tools and of localisation services that have Portuguese as their source language.

José Eduardo De Lucca teaches I18N/L10N at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. He is the general coordinator of Centro GeNESS, an incubator and technology transfer centre focused in software issues. He has been working in the I18N/L10N field since 1997, when he came across Internationalisation during his PhD studies. Since then, he has actively been involved in the area, spreading the word about Localisation in Brazil and fostering these activities among the Brazilian software exporter companies. E-mail: deluccaNOSPAM@geness.ufsc.br (remove NOSPAM to email).