The American Way Of Life In Brazil

Introduction-The American way of life in Brazil

Other than the world's fascination with Brazilian soccer players, Brazil is assumed to by most people to be an underdeveloped 3rd world country. In truth Brazil is South America's largest economy, having advanced industries, and is now considered an emerging economy rivaling China, India and Russia. Not only that, the Brazilian lifestyle has, unbeknown to most people, a typical western, if not American, flavor, as we will see.

Brazilians love watching imported television shows and movies translated to their official language, Brazilian Portuguese. Imported television shows have had a significant influence on Brazilian culture. The influence of American TV in Brazil has resulted in Brazilians participating in culture that is considered predominantly American. For example, Brazilian children now participate in Haloween on the same day it is held in the USA. Brazilians also love their Internet. For example, Orkut, a social networking website initially targeting the American audience, now derives over 70% of its traffic from Brazil. All major search engines and social networking groups, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Youtube, Myspace and Facebook have a presence in Brazil. Instead of using dot com, a sites in Brazil often use a dot com dot br configuration, for example http://www.google.com.br/. Often, instead of using www as a prefix, sites in Brazil will use br, for example, br.myspace.com rather than http://www.myspace.com/.

In these series of blogs, we will try to bring out the Americanisms of life in Brazil. We will translate articles touching the everyday lives of Brazilians and see the similarities to their American counterparts and the common problems they share: buying a car, buying a house, choosing a good school, getting loans for education(get student loan), having to get a bank student loan consolidation, buying life insurance(get cheap life assurance quote online, just like Americans), get auto insurance online, dealing with remortgage problems such as shopping for good rates, getting loans to refinance the home(refinance a home equity loan), difficulties in acknowledging mesothelioma(Brazil is one of the world's largest producers of absestos, and acknowledging that a miner is a potential mesothelioma patient is opposed actively by many trade unions), etc. In short, these series of blogs will try to bring out the American way of life in Brazil that that is not documented well by the main stream media.

You can contact me at translate_brazilian_portuguese_to_english@hotmail.com,.

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