TRANSLATION: A MIRROR OF CHANGE? MAFALDA ANSWERS

One of these changes is the near impossibility, in Brazilian Portuguese, of dropping the subject, due to the simplification of verbal morphology ascribable to the growing use of você(s) and a gente. As a result, Brazilian Portuguese takes distance from the group of languages which permit subject-dropping, like Spanish, Italian, and European Portuguese, and comes nearer to languages where the expression of the subject is mandatory, like French.

Here we compare the grammars of Brazilian and European Portuguese using as corpus translations of strips from Quino's Mafalda made both in Brazil and Portugal. Once comic strips are a genre in which there is an ambition of approaching the reality of spoken language, we expect that those translations mirror the normal uses of oral interaction in each of the two language cultures where the translations have been made, despite of being a fake orality.