BRAZIL ↔ CANADAWhen did anyone last read your Portuguese pages?
Not translate them — read them, the way a Brazilian applicant does. I reviewed eleven Canadian institutions this month, and the pattern was almost always the same: the paragraphs get translated and the buttons don’t.
See it for yourself
Four words that don’t survive machine translation
Portuguese has traps that translation engines walk straight into. Read the middle column — that’s what a Brazilian reads when a machine picks the wrong one.
| Your page says | A Brazilian reads | It should say |
|---|---|---|
| Propinas | “Bribes.” In Brazilian Portuguese, propina is a kickback — the word used in corruption headlines. It means “tuition” only in European Portuguese. | Mensalidade |
| Colégio | “High school.” A Brazilian assumes you’re a secondary school, not a post-secondary institution — and stops reading. | Faculdade |
| Candidate-se | This one isn’t even an error — it’s correct Portuguese. It’s just not the word Brazilians use, or type into Google, when looking for a course. A proofreader would pass it. Search traffic won’t. | Inscreva-se |
| R$ 1,500.00 | “One and a half reais.” Brazil swaps the separators. Your tuition reads a thousand times cheaper — or as an obvious error. | R$ 1.500,00 |
Errors like these survive review cycles — including reviews by fluent speakers — because of who gets asked what. The translator is handed the body copy. Nobody hands them the button labels, the form fields, the price formatting or the plugin defaults. Those are treated as interface, not language.
August 2026 · what I actually found
The translation usually stops right before the button
Think about what that does. A Brazilian reads your page in their own language, gets convinced, reaches the moment of action — and hits a wall of English. You paid to translate the persuasion and left the conversion untranslated.
The four failures, in order of how often I saw them
$28.00/week instead of the separators and wording a Brazilian reads without stumbling.Sound familiar?
The symptoms are usually the same
This isn’t for you if Brazil isn’t an active market for you yet. The Sprint fixes and measures what already exists — it isn’t a market-entry study.
What changes
Three things fixed, not recommended in a PDF
On day 10 you don’t get a list of what you should do. You get the things already done.
You can finally see what your Brazil spend is buying
Right now you can’t say which page, ad or search brought the student who enrolled.
- GA4 + conversion events — form, WhatsApp, brochure, application started
- Brazil traffic segmented — that audience on its own
- One-page dashboard — five numbers, checked weekly
Brazilians can find you, and understand you when they do
Two problems that look like one: errors, and correct words nobody searches for. The second costs more, and no proofread catches it.
- Keyword research in pt-BR — mapped against the words your pages use today
- hreflang and pt-BR / pt-PT audit — Google treats Brazil and Portugal as separate markets
- Rewritten and published — not delivered as suggestions
- A glossary your team keeps — so the next translation doesn’t undo it
You know exactly what to do next, and in what order
12 to 18 real actions, ranked by impact over effort, in three 30-day blocks.
- Each item with an hours estimate and whether it needs outside help
- A teardown of the Brazil ads your competitors are running right now
- 45-minute handover call, recorded
How it works
Two weeks, once we’ve spoken
You should not hand website access to someone you have never spoken to. What you will not get: a proposal document, a procurement cycle, or three meetings before anyone says a number.
Investment
Fixed fee, paid once, no twenty-page proposal
You know what you’re getting and what it costs before you ever speak to me. Invoiced, not charged — so it goes through your normal accounts payable, not a corporate card.
| This Sprint | A translator | Agency without a PT speaker | New hire | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corrects wrong words | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Fixes buttons, forms, price formats | ✓ | — | — | EVENTUALLY |
| Knows what Brazilians search for | ✓ | — | — | EVENTUALLY |
| Installs measurement | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Publishes the fix, not a document | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cost | CAD 1,200 once | ~CAD 200 | retainer | 3,500–4,500/mo |
| Time to done | 2 weeks | days | weeks | months |
A translator is cheaper and does one of these seven things. A new hire does most of them, in months, at three times the monthly cost. Your agency is probably very good — and Portuguese is not the gap it was built to fill.
Measurement guarantee
If at the end of two weeks you can’t see, on your own, where each visit comes from and which ones became enquiries, I refund the full fee. No argument, no form. It isn’t a promise about future results — it’s something you verify on day 10.
Who does this
The person doing the work
Raquel Camargo
Brazilian Canadian · Founder, Inka Digital Works
Journalist, digital marketing strategist, educator and entrepreneur. She specializes in digital solutions for marketing and business, combining communications, analytics, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.
She has worked with UOL, government organizations, startups, Sebrae and international companies across Brazil, Australia, Dubai, Singapore and Canada. Raquel has also taught Search Engine Marketing at Concordia University, and is the founder of Inka Digital Works and mentor of This Is About AI.
Today she supports organizations and professionals through digital strategy, consulting, education and technology-driven business solutions.
Based in Toronto · works in English and Portuguese · fully remote
Inka Digital Works works the Brazil–Canada corridor: Canadian institutions and companies selling to Brazilians, Brazilian and Latin businesses established in Canada, and Brazilian companies entering North America.
Before you book
Questions everyone asks
Do I need to give you access to our website?
You choose, and the result is the same either way. Option A: you give me access to your CMS and I implement everything. Option B: we run a 90-minute screen-share and you implement while I guide, with no credentials shared.
Many institutions prefer B — and it has an advantage: your team learns how to do it.
Couldn’t we just hire a translator?
A translator fixes words. Roughly half of what I find isn’t wrong words — it’s right words in the wrong place, or English left in the places that matter most. A translator is handed body copy; nobody hands them button labels, form fields, price formatting or plugin defaults.
And a translator won’t tell you that “candidate-se” is impeccable Portuguese that almost nobody searches for. That isn’t a language question — it’s a search question, and it’s where most of the lost traffic actually sits.
We already have an agency. Does this replace them?
No, and it isn’t meant to. This is a narrow, two-week job on one market — the kind most agencies don’t staff for and wouldn’t want to scope. The Sprint hands them measurement they can act on and Portuguese they can build on. Many clients pass the 90-day plan straight to their existing agency.
We already have Google Analytics installed.
Almost everyone does. Almost nobody has it configured with conversion events that mean anything, or with the Brazil audience segmented. I audit what’s there, fix what’s broken, and the time saved goes into the second outcome. You don’t pay for work that didn’t need doing.
What actually happens on the call?
You bring the URL of your Portuguese page. I share my screen and show you what I’ve already found on it — the same way the examples above were found. That takes most of the thirty minutes.
Then one of two things. Either it’s worth doing, and I send an invoice with the scope written out. Or it isn’t, and I’ll say so — I’d rather lose the fee than deliver a report you can’t use. Either way you leave the call knowing something about your own site that you didn’t know before.
Isn’t this just a lead-in to a monthly contract?
The Sprint stands on its own: you keep the measurement, the rewritten pages and the plan, and can execute with anyone — including without me. If ongoing work makes sense afterwards, I’ll say so. If it doesn’t, you got three concrete deliverables for less than one month of agency retainer.
Do you only work on Brazil?
Brazil is where the deepest expertise sits, and it’s the market this page is about. I’ve built marketing operations in Australia, Dubai, Singapore and Canada as well, so if your question is about a different market, ask — I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right person for it.
Every word can be correct and still be the wrong word.
Translation optimises for accuracy. Applicants search, click and decide using the words they actually say — and those are rarely the same thing. That gap never shows up in a proofread. It shows up in your conversion rate.
