Today, Brazilian society is linguistically dominated by Portuguese, with Brazil constituting the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world by a huge margin. But the inhabitants of the territory that makes up Brazil didn’t always speak Portuguese. For thousands of years, the land was alive with a plethora of different ethnolinguistic groups speaking a wide variety of languages, and despite the ubiquity of Portuguese today, many of these languages—such as Mawé—still persist.
Roughly 6,000 people are native speakers of Mawé today, and many of them are monolingual in the language. Tucked away deep in the Amazon rainforest, the Mawé people have largely resisted assimilation into larger Brazilian society and have kept their traditions and language alive. But, of course, the influences of Portuguese and mainstream Brazilian culture are strong and pose a threat to the proud indigenous language. Here at TranslationServices.com, we’re eager to support the Mawé language with our new Mawé translation services.
Contact us today for a free quote for our Mawé translation services!
An exploration into the Mawé language
Many of the indigenous Brazilian languages with sizable speaker communities today are located in the northwest of the country, in the Brazilian portion of the Amazon rainforest, and Mawé is no exception. Mawé, also known as Sateré, is spoken in the municipalities of Parintins, Barreirinha, and Maués, as well as on the outskirts of Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas. Four Mawé communities exist on the outskirts of Manaus: Y’Apryrehyt, Maué, I’nhã-bé, and Waikiru. The Mawé people welcome a lot of tourists to their communities, and the interest in their culture helps them keep their customs and language alive.
Mawé belongs to the Tupian language family, which consists of some 70 languages across South America, particularly Brazil. The biggest languages in the family are Tupi, surviving today as Nheengatu, and Guaraní, a highly institutionalized language in Paraguay. Mawé is only distantly related to these major Amerindian tongues. The language features complex grammar, with the pronominal system presenting particular difficulties. Personal prefixes attach to nouns to indicate possession, with different sets of pronouns for different types of nouns. Verbs are also marked with personal prefixes, with the prefixes differing for transitive and intransitive verbs. Yet another set of prenominal prefixes is used for stative verbs, which are effectively verbs that function semantically as adjectives. Tricky? Certainly—but that’s why we’ve hired native-speaking Mawé translators for our team.
Providing the best in Mawé translation services
Since Mawé is a minority indigenous language hidden away in the Brazilian Amazon, it’s not easy to find reliable translation services for the language, and those that exist usually cater to Portuguese. We wanted to make Mawé translation services more accessible, so we went around Amazonas to recruit the best Mawé translators we could find. Despite the small speaker community and large percentage of monolingualism, we’ve created our own Mawé translation team that represents various varieties of the language, with services for translation both to and from Mawé.
We’ll do our best to accommodate the unique needs of our clients, whatever they may be. For example, are you a researcher looking to connect with Mawé speakers? We can translate research surveys into the language. We can also translate learning materials into Mawé to foster native-language education for Mawé children. Businesses around Manaus and elsewhere in Amazonas may be interested in translating promotional materials into Mawé to target these indigenous communities—and we can help with that. Our team can also translate the rich stories and legends of the Mawé into English to share with other cultures, and we can translate international content (from books and poems to apps and games) into Mawé to enrich the body of content available in the minority language.
If you need Mawé translation services, we’re here for you. Contact us today to place your first Mawé translation order.