Portugal’s parliament has voted to phase in over six years changes to the Portuguese language in order to spell hundreds of words the Brazilian way, as reported in a BBC News story. 

The agreement standardizes numerous spellings and adds the letters k, w, and y to the alphabet. Silent consonants will be deleted to spell words more phonetically. For example, "optimo" (great) would become "otimo."

Seven Portuguese-speaking countries agreed on a unified form of Portuguese in 1991. More than 230 million people live in the eight countries that constitute the CPLP, the Community of Countries of the Portuguese Language (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa): Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and of course Portugal itself, which has approximately 10 million speakers.

Left to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one.
 — Goethe, 1827.

This belief that international literature plays a vital role in book culture is one that is shared by all the publishers and booksellers involved in Reading the World, a celebration of literature in translation to be held at BookPeople on Friday, June 6.

Noted Russian translator Marian Schwartz will moderate the hour-long program, which begins at 7 p.m. and will consist of three parts:

1. Liliana Valenzuela reading from her translation from English into Spanish: Cristina Garcia, A Handbook to Luck/Las Caras de la Suerte

2. Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey reading from her translation from Portuguese: Teeth Under the Sun by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Dalkey Archive P, 2007).

3. Michele McKay Aynesworth presenting Beacons, the literary journal of the American Translators Association, with readings by the following: Liliana Valenzuela, Tony Beckwith, and Rob Cogswell and his translator, Horacio Peña.

This event is hosted by the Austin Area Translators and Interpreters Association. 

The PEN American Center has announced the winner of this year’s Translation Prize, and it couldn’t have gone to a more accomplished translator. This year’s award goes to Margaret Jull Costa for her translation into English from the Portuguese of The Maias (New Directions) by Eça de Queirós.

From the judges’ citation:

Over the years Margaret Jull Costa has produced a number of notable translations of the fiction of Eça de Queirós, the great Portuguese novelist, who is widely considered to be one of the major European novelists of the 19th century, often ranked with Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Most recently, Margaret Jull Costa turned her hand to Os Maias, Eça de Queirós’s greatest work, and the results are stunning. The sensuous elegance of the prose vividly captures the greatness of the original, bringing the novel to life for the reader in a way only the most masterful of translations can do. Clearly a labor of love, Margaret Jull Costa’s brilliant translation of The Maias stands as a masterpiece in its own right. Eça de Queirós lives in English!