Meet Pasquale!
This week we interviewed one of our translators, Pasquale. He has been working with us for 3 years and today we share a bit about the man himself.
1. “Tell us a little bit about yourself”
“My name is Pasquale and I am 32 years old. I was born in Naples, Italy where I lived until 2011. Then I moved to Portugal, where I spent 2 years and met my wife. We finally moved to Manaus, Brazil, in 2014, where we currently live with our dog. My hobbies include cooking, watching movies and series, listening to music, travelling, playing video games and football.”
2. “What space does translation occupy in your life? Why did you choose to become a translator? What translations do you find most difficult?”
“I work full-time as a freelance translator and proofreader with Italian and Portuguese as my target languages. The thing I most like about being a freelance translator, and which led me to choose it as my profession, is that it allows me to travel as much as I can and be flexible with schedules comfortably working from home.
On the other hand, the most challenging aspect is that to ensure a constant workflow you must be always available and responsive, and you must pay great attention detail and quality even when you are working to very tight timelines. The job of translator is important because it helps to either promote the globalisation and the meeting of cultures through the translations provided and the preservation of regional nuances through localisation efforts in vernacular languages.”
3. “You’re Italian but you live in Brazil. What do you miss the most about Italy? And what brought you to Brazil in the first place?”
“I began travelling in 2008 as a result of the global economic crisis, the effects of which were particularly felt in the South of Italy. Most of all, I miss my family, the food and the warm embrace of the San Paolo, the stadium of my favourite team, Napoli. I decided to move to Brazil with my wife and specifically to Manaus, in the Amazon, because her family lives here. So we built a new home and a new life here.”
4. “In your opinion, what’s the strangest tradition that is still observed in Brazil?”
Brazil is so big that seems to be a continent all by itself, and throughout the country there are a wide variety of regional differences. The strangest practice, for me, is probably the macumba. You can also find some rather unexpected food recipes. For example, here in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, you can frequently eat farofa (toasted manioc flour) with giant ants or tacacá (made with jambú, a native variety of paracress, and tucupi, a broth made with wild manioc, as well as dried prawns and small yellow peppers).”