Portuguese (Brazil) style guide

Use Brazilian Portuguese for this edition. The catalog key pt identifies this page; it does not make Brazilian usage the default for every Portuguese-speaking audience. Use Portuguese for Portugal for that edition. Shared grammar and message guidance below applies to both where no regional difference is specified.

Follow the common registers, mechanics and localization review. Write natural Portuguese while preserving the source’s facts, conditions and required actions. An informal tone does not authorize changing a product capability.

Address and agreement

For broadly addressed Brazilian product help, use você with third-person verb forms: Você pode salvar o arquivo. An imperative can omit the pronoun: Salve o arquivo. This is the house default for this edition, not a claim that every Brazilian audience uses the same form of address. Follow a more specific brief where needed, keeping pronouns and verb forms consistent.

Omit repeated subject pronouns when the actor remains clear. Keep a subject or possessive when it distinguishes the reader from another person: seu arquivo and o arquivo de outra pessoa are not interchangeable. A sentence about an administrator’s permission must not become a promise that every reader can act.

Use grammatical agreement with the noun: o arquivo selecionado, a pasta selecionada. Grammatical gender does not establish a person’s gender. A pessoa responsável can avoid an unnecessary assumption; replacing one person with a equipe may change the actor or responsibility. Preserve roles, number and obligations, and use a real person’s own pronouns. See accessible content.

Regional vocabulary and exact actions

Use arquivo, salvar, tela, senha, usuário and configurações for the corresponding Brazilian concepts. Check the glossary and the actual interface: these examples do not rename an existing control. Aba can name a browser tab; use the approved product term for another kind of tab.

Prefer familiar wording when it preserves the action. Escolher can describe choosing a color; selecionar can describe selecting an object. They are not interchangeable merely to add variety. Likewise, acessar a page, visitar a site and obtaining permission to access a file can describe different things. Keep technical terms precise.

Retain instructions that make a task work. If a messaging interface requires Enter to send, Digite a mensagem e pressione Enter para enviá-la. preserves both actions. Escreva uma mensagem does not. Follow interface actions for the actual input method; do not remove a required gesture to make wording device-neutral.

Do not narrow datas especiais to birthdays, turn an absent person into an offline person, or replace a named activity with a different sport without an explicit adaptation brief. A setup instruction that says there are more steps must retain them. Marketing may reshape an image or rhythm; it must keep amounts, audience, limitations and claims.

Articles, prepositions and modifiers

Choose the article for the intended reference: Selecione um arquivo permits a choice; selecione o arquivo identifies one. A definite article does not always mean every item in a system. In Brazilian usage, an article before a possessive can vary with the construction and register; do not add or remove it mechanically.

Use the preposition required by the Portuguese relationship. Lista de arquivos and lista dos arquivos selecionados have different scopes. A sequence of English nouns must be understood before translation, not simply reversed. A manager for one server and a manager for several servers need different wording when that distinction matters.

Adjectives often follow nouns, but position can change emphasis or meaning. Um novo arquivo and um arquivo novo are not a universal before/after correction pair. Preserve agreement when modifiers are separated from their nouns.

Choose the article and gender of a borrowed term from established usage and the approved term. Product names are not universally masculine. An explicit noun can clarify a reference: o aplicativo FontLab. Do not add o before an arbitrary product-name variable without knowing its possible values.

Tense, mood and message state

Use the tense and aspect of the actual event. O arquivo foi salvo. reports completion; o arquivo será salvo predicts it. A future guarantee must not become a statement that something is already enabled. Preserve conditions and uncertainty when simplifying clauses.

Brazilian progress text commonly uses a gerund: Salvando o arquivo. Portugal commonly uses A guardar o ficheiro. Neither construction proves completion. Prefer a direct future form when it says enough; do not declare every future progressive ungrammatical. Duration or an action in progress at a future time can be meaningful.

Keep a subjunctive where the meaning requires it: Se o arquivo estiver aberto, feche-o antes de continuar. Rewriting a sentence can simplify its structure, but a preference for the present tense does not erase a hypothetical condition.

Meaning	Brazilian wording
Action label	Salvar arquivo
Instruction	Salve o arquivo.
In progress	Salvando o arquivo.
Completed	O arquivo foi salvo.
Failed attempt	Não foi possível salvar o arquivo.
Present limitation	Não é possível salvar o arquivo.

A warning must retain everyone affected: Se você reiniciar agora, você e outras pessoas que usam este computador poderão perder o trabalho não salvo. Keep the possible consequence as a possibility. Do not add a cause, recovery promise or restart instruction without product evidence.

Messages and placeholders

A short message such as Memória insuficiente may be enough when context supplies the rest. Retain verbs that carry important timing, agency or conditions. A completed failure and a present limitation are different states, even if an old translation memory uses one phrase for both. See interface feedback.

Check what each variable can contain. Não foi possível abrir o arquivo {name}. assumes a single file name. It cannot safely receive an arbitrary product name or a plural list without reviewing the complete sentence. Use full messages and realistic substituted values, following messages and variables.

Keep parser identifiers, argument names, format specifiers, escapes and markup intact. Translate a human-readable placeholder only when its contract permits it. Reorder runtime arguments only if the format supports reordering. A character placeholder is not necessarily a letter; do not infer its allowed values from an old catalog.

Capitalization and abbreviations

Use sentence case for new headings and labels: Opções de exportação. Keep accents on capitals: ÁREA, Últimos arquivos. Preserve the exact spelling, case and punctuation of an existing interface label when referring to it. English title case is not a rule for new Portuguese strings.

Use established abbreviations only when the audience understands them. Keep accents and periods in forms such as pág. and séc. Do not invent a truncation by deleting arbitrary letters or prepositions. Symbols such as mm, GB and Hz retain their defined case and do not take abbreviation periods or plural endings.

In Brazilian prose, a lowercase s can mark the plural of an initialism: PCs, without an apostrophe. Keep approved names and identifiers exact. Explain an unfamiliar abbreviation at first useful mention; do not expand a familiar file format on every screen or invent its full name. Use established local equivalents where relevant to the audience.

Punctuation and technical notation

Do not put a space before a comma, period, question mark or exclamation mark. A complete question can be Quer continuar? Avoid doubled spaces after sentence punctuation. In a simple list, a comma before the final e is normally unnecessary; clauses may require different punctuation.

Use “…” for quoted prose in this Brazilian edition and ‘…’ for an inner quotation. Preserve straight quotation marks where code or input requires them. Follow the common mechanics for interface labels, retaining an ellipsis that is part of the actual label. Complete sentences take a period; compact labels normally do not. Determine a string’s role and runtime context instead of copying source punctuation blindly.

Use … for an ellipsis. Distinguish a word hyphen - from a range dash – and a mathematical minus −. Examples are páginas 4–6 and −18 °C. The negative value has no space after the minus and a nonbreaking space before the unit. Required input syntax keeps its own characters.

Numbers and formats

Use a decimal comma in ordinary Brazilian prose: 12,5 mm. Keep quantities explicit in technical instructions. Use a nonbreaking space where a value and its unit must stay together, including web documentation; verify the rendered output. This edition also uses 25 % in technical prose. An input field may require a different syntax.

Preserve the numeric value when translating large-number names. 1,000,000,000 in English is um bilhão in Brazil and mil milhões in Portugal. Thus 16,000,000,000 becomes 16 bilhões in Brazil. Do not convert names by spelling alone. Use digits when they make a large value easier to check.

A Brazilian-real amount can be R$ 12,50; identify the currency when readers could confuse it. A written date such as 13 de setembro de 2026 avoids ambiguous numeric ordering. Use the application’s locale formatter for dynamic values. Versions, identifiers and timestamps keep their defined syntax; a version is not a decimal quantity. See names and formats.

Keyboard wording and narration

Use key names and shortcuts from the actual platform and keyboard layout. Enter, Ctrl and seta para baixo are examples, not a universal mapping. Distinguish a shortcut from an access key; a supplier’s ampersand or ribbon syntax does not define every product. Test collisions and focus behavior in the interface.

For narration, use natural Brazilian pronunciation and approved product-name pronunciation. Do not enforce one accent across all Brazilian speakers. Read necessary characters in an address or identifier when the listener must reproduce it. A pause can express prose punctuation but cannot replace a mathematical operation. Use the shared audiovisual guidance for captions, timing and visual information.