Brazil Is a Crazy Country
Oct. 2nd, 2007 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nathaliaBrazil is a country different from any other I know and proud of it.
It is a country where you can meet a girl who is a few years older than me and whose name is "Leidi Daiana". She was named after the late Lady Di and her mother doesn't seem to have understood that "Lady" was not a part of the woman's name. And as for spelling, nobody cares about that, anyway, right?
This is one example on Brazil's oddities. Another one is that they are not able to simply incorporate something into their culture, they have to make it their own. When American day-time soaps reached Brazil, the Brazilians decided that they needed their own tv series and they have very decent ones. A very famous one is "O Clone" that ran for about a year and a half (a long time for a Brazilian soap as they are produced with en ending already in mind and stuff). It got media attention fron all over the world and the rights to the love story between the rich industrialist Lucas and the muslim raised in Brazil Jade were bought by tv stations all over the world. In Brazil, each tv station you don't have to pay for puts out at least three different soaps a day, at least five days a week, usually six. The biggest station has six daily-running soaps, most of which can be watched every day but Sunday. They have made soaps their own product and even I, overly critical as I am, have to admit that they put out good stuff, the best being "O Clone" as cited above. They don't copy from American shows like Germany usually does, they come up with their own stories, usually set in Brazil and entertaining to watch. And they have an awful lot of talented actors, one of which has become famous internationally, Rodrigo Santoro.
Another example for how Brazilians incorporate foreign aspects into their culture so that sooner or later you actually forget that it once wasn't theirs is football. Brazil pwns football. Granted, they have their bad days (world cup 2006) but they are very good. My father once said that the Brazilian soccer players came up with totally new things to do with the ball, my mother likes to say that when they are a team and not playing "every man for himself", it's as if they are performing a perfectly rehearsed dance and nobody has ever been able to copy their style.
There are some examples where you can't help it but make fun of the Brazilian culture and its attempt to modify everything before adopting it into their culture. In Chile, I talked to a Brazilian guy who was into martial arts and there was a girl who knew a lot about that stuff as well and he kept trying to explain that what she called ju-jitsu wasn't exactly what he called ju-jitsu because when that sport came to Brazil, they changed it a bit to have it fit their purposes.
It's like translating books. You CAN'T just call Hufflepuff Hufflepuff. No, Lufa Lufa is the way to go. And while the members of the Weasley family are called Artur, Molly, Gui, Carlinhos, Percy, Frederico, Jorge, Rony and Gina. Harry's full name isn't Harry James Potter but Harry Tiago Potter (as his parents were Tiago and Lilían Potter). And when the translator isn't too happy with the source text, he has the option to just CHANGE the content of said part of the book, add a letter Hermione wrote to Harry and Ron at some point, cut and modify the Blacks' family tree. Oh yeah, Válter, Petúnia and Duda as well as Tía Guida (Aunt Marge) as well as quadribol (Quidditch), Grifinória, Corvinal and Sonserina are the other three Houses (besides Lufa Lufa). And a translation I like in particular is that it was chosen to name the Muggles "trouxas" which literally is a make-shift bag you out the most necessary things in before making a quick escape.
But this is not why I am writing all this. This is just to show that Brazilians are a bit different. And as I will now point out, they manage to get illegal things done legally.
A short story before getting to the meat: I was on the beach with my cousin and sister once and a guy who sold copies of DVDs and CDs walked up to us offering to sell us some (that's quite usual). My cousin asked him for the most recent CD of a famous Brazilian singer and he told us, "I'm sorry, I just sold my last copy to that policeman on the other side of the street."
As for the reason of this whole post: Today I was looking for a site where I could download Portuguese subtitles for the episodes of the third season of Lost for my grandma who is hooked on the series. I stumbled over a link to a SERIOUS website that was offering the third season of Lost on DVD already. Not copies, the original with all features, in English, Portuguese and Spanish with subtitles in these three languages and loads of additional stuff.
Now, I know that the third season of Lost will only be released on DVD in the US in December. I checked and in some other countries it is scheduled to be released on October and November, but apparently it has been out in Brazil for at least a few weeks now and I can't find any press releases on this subject and it just makes me laugh because this is so typical for Brazil, to release a highly anticipated DVD set before its official release date (there IS a law according to which nothing is allowed to be released in Brazil before it is released in its country of origin).
It just amuses me.
It is a country where you can meet a girl who is a few years older than me and whose name is "Leidi Daiana". She was named after the late Lady Di and her mother doesn't seem to have understood that "Lady" was not a part of the woman's name. And as for spelling, nobody cares about that, anyway, right?
This is one example on Brazil's oddities. Another one is that they are not able to simply incorporate something into their culture, they have to make it their own. When American day-time soaps reached Brazil, the Brazilians decided that they needed their own tv series and they have very decent ones. A very famous one is "O Clone" that ran for about a year and a half (a long time for a Brazilian soap as they are produced with en ending already in mind and stuff). It got media attention fron all over the world and the rights to the love story between the rich industrialist Lucas and the muslim raised in Brazil Jade were bought by tv stations all over the world. In Brazil, each tv station you don't have to pay for puts out at least three different soaps a day, at least five days a week, usually six. The biggest station has six daily-running soaps, most of which can be watched every day but Sunday. They have made soaps their own product and even I, overly critical as I am, have to admit that they put out good stuff, the best being "O Clone" as cited above. They don't copy from American shows like Germany usually does, they come up with their own stories, usually set in Brazil and entertaining to watch. And they have an awful lot of talented actors, one of which has become famous internationally, Rodrigo Santoro.
Another example for how Brazilians incorporate foreign aspects into their culture so that sooner or later you actually forget that it once wasn't theirs is football. Brazil pwns football. Granted, they have their bad days (world cup 2006) but they are very good. My father once said that the Brazilian soccer players came up with totally new things to do with the ball, my mother likes to say that when they are a team and not playing "every man for himself", it's as if they are performing a perfectly rehearsed dance and nobody has ever been able to copy their style.
There are some examples where you can't help it but make fun of the Brazilian culture and its attempt to modify everything before adopting it into their culture. In Chile, I talked to a Brazilian guy who was into martial arts and there was a girl who knew a lot about that stuff as well and he kept trying to explain that what she called ju-jitsu wasn't exactly what he called ju-jitsu because when that sport came to Brazil, they changed it a bit to have it fit their purposes.
It's like translating books. You CAN'T just call Hufflepuff Hufflepuff. No, Lufa Lufa is the way to go. And while the members of the Weasley family are called Artur, Molly, Gui, Carlinhos, Percy, Frederico, Jorge, Rony and Gina. Harry's full name isn't Harry James Potter but Harry Tiago Potter (as his parents were Tiago and Lilían Potter). And when the translator isn't too happy with the source text, he has the option to just CHANGE the content of said part of the book, add a letter Hermione wrote to Harry and Ron at some point, cut and modify the Blacks' family tree. Oh yeah, Válter, Petúnia and Duda as well as Tía Guida (Aunt Marge) as well as quadribol (Quidditch), Grifinória, Corvinal and Sonserina are the other three Houses (besides Lufa Lufa). And a translation I like in particular is that it was chosen to name the Muggles "trouxas" which literally is a make-shift bag you out the most necessary things in before making a quick escape.
But this is not why I am writing all this. This is just to show that Brazilians are a bit different. And as I will now point out, they manage to get illegal things done legally.
A short story before getting to the meat: I was on the beach with my cousin and sister once and a guy who sold copies of DVDs and CDs walked up to us offering to sell us some (that's quite usual). My cousin asked him for the most recent CD of a famous Brazilian singer and he told us, "I'm sorry, I just sold my last copy to that policeman on the other side of the street."
As for the reason of this whole post: Today I was looking for a site where I could download Portuguese subtitles for the episodes of the third season of Lost for my grandma who is hooked on the series. I stumbled over a link to a SERIOUS website that was offering the third season of Lost on DVD already. Not copies, the original with all features, in English, Portuguese and Spanish with subtitles in these three languages and loads of additional stuff.
Now, I know that the third season of Lost will only be released on DVD in the US in December. I checked and in some other countries it is scheduled to be released on October and November, but apparently it has been out in Brazil for at least a few weeks now and I can't find any press releases on this subject and it just makes me laugh because this is so typical for Brazil, to release a highly anticipated DVD set before its official release date (there IS a law according to which nothing is allowed to be released in Brazil before it is released in its country of origin).
It just amuses me.
