Translate an XLIFF file into Portuguese (Portugal or Brazil)

European or Brazilian Portuguese: decide before you upload

Manuce treats European and Brazilian Portuguese as two separate languages, and for software the difference is large. A Brazilian interface says arquivo, tela, salvar, usuário; a Portuguese one says ficheiro, ecrã, guardar, utilizador. Forms of address differ too: você is standard in Brazil, whereas European UI copy often prefers infinitives or impersonal phrasing (Guardar alterações).

Inside the file, the locale is declared by target-language on <file> in XLIFF 1.2, or trgLang on <xliff> in 2.0. Manuce only changes the targets and the state attribute, so set pt-PT or pt-BR yourself to make sure your CAT tool or build pipeline files the result correctly.

If you ship to both markets, order both variants from the same source file; a two-language order gets a 20% discount.

What Portuguese does to your strings

• Length. Portuguese usually runs longer than English: Settings becomes Configurações in Brazil and Definições in Portugal; Sign in becomes Iniciar sessão. Buttons and tabs overflow first.
• Gender and placeholders. Welcome, %s forces a choice between Bem-vindo and Bem-vinda; in %s becomes no, na or em depending on the inserted word. No translation can guess what the variable will hold.
• Plurals. XLIFF has no plural mechanism of its own; plurals often travel as ICU expressions inside the source, as in Angular projects. Portuguese has three CLDR categories: one, many, other. The trap: in Brazilian Portuguese one covers 0 and 1 (0 arquivo), in European Portuguese only 1 (0 ficheiros). many is reserved for large round numbers (1 milhão de ficheiros).
• Typography. Headings take a capital on the first word only (Definições da conta, not Definições Da Conta), and months and weekdays are lower case. Title-case English source strings should not be mirrored.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

You get the same XLIFF file back, ready to drop into your project: each source is translated into its target and state is updated. Indentation, ordering, quotes, comments, line endings, encoding and BOM are preserved. Inline tags (<g>, <x/>, <ph>…) stay in sequence: Click <g id="1">Save</g> to continue becomes Clique em <g id="1">Guardar</g> para continuar. A string that would lose a tag is rejected and flagged.

Units marked translate="no" are respected, and the notes in the file are passed to the translator as context. IDs, URLs, email addresses, numbers, colours, date formats and empty values are not translated. Every target is checked against its source; if a placeholder such as {count} or %1$s keeps going missing, the source text is kept and the report says so.

The report lists translated strings and those left as they were, with the reason. Do not rely on the translation to add a plural branch missing from the source or to respect a character limit: check those yourself. Manuce does not take glossaries or translation memories.

Preparing the file and checking the result

• Mark product names and any labels that must stay unchanged with translate="no".
• Add notes where Portuguese needs to know more: the gender behind a placeholder ("%s = user's first name"), the string type (button, heading, error message), the space available.
• Read the free sample: the vocabulary must match the variant you chose (ficheiro or arquivo) and the form of address must be consistent. If a term should stay in English, check it there, then again in the delivered file.
• After delivery, open the report: a string left in the source language always has a reason, usually a placeholder or tag that could not be matched.
• Re-import and test the Portuguese UI with real data: truncated buttons, agreement with variables, plurals with 0 and 1.

In practice

1. Pick the variant (pt-PT or pt-BR) and set target-language or trgLang in the file.
2. Mark fixed terms with translate="no" and add context notes.
3. Upload the file, review the quote and check the free sample.
4. Download the translated XLIFF and its report.
5. Re-import it and test the interface with real values.