​© Gaby Jongenelen Photography for CELA EU

Pedro Viegas
Emerging translator Dutch into Portuguese

'All of a sudden I felt drawn to literature. Dutch offered me something new: playfulness, experimentation and an eye for the mundane.'

Pedro Viegas (1981) started doing translation work and working as freelancer for a company specialized in adoption procedures after studying Management at university. At the beginning of 2016 he created a physical shop at the old Phillips-complex in Eindhoven, which was meant for selling high quality Portuguese tinned fish. A couple of months later, he created a webshop for the very same shop. On the one hand he gets to work in business and marketing and on the other hand, he’s able to do translation work, something he truly enjoys. One of the goals he has defined for his life is to translate books and films.

Pedro Viegas was never a great reader: ‘I was into film; as a child I rarely read books.’ In the Netherlands that changed: in the space of eight years, he read more than in the preceding twenty in Portugal. ‘All of a sudden I felt drawn to literature. Much more so than in Portugal. Dutch offered me something new: playfulness, experimentation and an eye for the mundane. Dutch is a language that can make even the ugly beautiful.’ Thanks to Dutch, Viegas has begun to appreciate Portuguese more too. ‘Grammatically, Portuguese is quite similar to Spanish, but it’s a language with a distinct character. It’s more Slavic, rougher perhaps. That’s nice, it doesn’t take much for the language to feel grand.’

Education

Management at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Coimbra, and Marketing
Research at the University of Groningen

Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) / Dutch as a Foreign Language Certificate (NT2)

CELA live dates

Lev – Literatura em Viagem, Portugal, 10-12 May 2019

Contact

Connecting Emerging Literary Artists: noortje@wintertuin.nl