In a normal dinner, my roommate told me he had watched a TV show talking about Brazil. We started talking about what he watched, and he asked me about soap operas1. He told me they said soap operas were a big deal in Brazil. I had never heard the expression soap operas before that day, and I thought he was talking about a kind of opera2. I said that I didn't believe that soap operas were so important in Brazil, and I said that novels3 were a big deal. However, he insisted that he had seen that soap operas were a big deal, so I decided to translate the meaning of soap operas. I started laughing, and I said "Oh yeah, they are really a big deal in Brazil. We have soap operas in the afternoon, in the evening, at night! Many Brazilians will stop everything they are doing just to watch it, specially if it is the last episode." We both laughed.
My mistake was that I was trying to translate using the approximation of the spelling. In Brazil, soap operas are spelled “Novelas”, so in my mind the translation for "Novela" should be "Novel". We have to
pay attention to that because there are a few similar words with different meanings.
1 Soap Operas: television or radio program that has
continuing stories about the daily lives and problems of a group of people (Translation in Portuguese:
Novela)
2 Opera: a kind of performance in which actors sing
all or most of the words of a play with music performed by an orchestra. (Translation in Portuguese:
Ópera)
3 Novel: a long written story usually about imaginary
characters and events. (Translation in Portuguese: Romance)
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