Abstract

Recent data from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs shows that 4215800 Brazilians live abroad. Of these, 46,06% reside in North America. Voluntary migration from Brazil, often caused by severe economic crises, began in the mid-1980s. Most migrants chose the United States to live and work to escape from poor labor relations, social inequality, and the violence that arose as the result of economic stagnation. In this paper, I present the results of a case study of a Brazilian linguist, 58, who left Brazil in the 1980s largely because of the factors aforementioned. She earned her Master’s and Doctorate degrees at a university in the US, she writes academic papers and (self)translates texts from/into her mother tongue or from/into English, a foreign language to her, and claims that (self)translation is an integral part of her professional and personal life. She is, thus, an agent of translation as she has gained the ability to translate (Cronin 2006). This case study was conducted through a semi-structured videoconferencing interview, as well as through e-mails aimed at clarifying statements made during the interview. The interview was organized around four themes: a (brief) personal account of the migration of the linguist and her family to the us; descriptions of the beginning of her academic career; her writing process; and the place of translation and self-translation in her academic and personal life. My analysis followed several previous studies. Firstly, Bennett (2015: 10) and the discussion on «signs of language change» in Portuguese and the move towards a loss in the particular characteristics of a culture and the standardization of academic language. The second main source, Polezzi (2012), examines the crucial ways migrant writers exercise their agency. Finally, Chan (2016) argues that academic writing in one’s second language can be understood as self-translation since writers go through a process of mental translation when they write a text in a language other than their own. The analysis of the semi-structured interview shows her career in three different universities in the US can be seen as successful. The linguist can be regarded as an agent of self-translation as she consciously and mentally translates from and into one of the languages (Portuguese or English) when she writes. The scholar argues that her writing style in Portuguese has changed, and believes this is due to constant reading and writing in English.