By taking an opportunity to interpret from Portuguese to English, students got a firsthand taste of what real-world translation demands.
Hands-on experience, widely understood to be an important aspect of learning, can be hard to find for students studying Portuguese translation. In his Introduction to Translation class, Professor Jordan B. Jones (Brazilian Literature) ensures that his students get their fair share. He provides them with opportunities to practice their language skills and build their own translation portfolios, helping them understand the real-life applications of their skills.
Translation and Interpretation
Jones’s class, Portuguese 360, focuses on teaching students to use their language skills to translate written materials and interpret spoken discourse. Although BYU offers an entire major devoted to Spanish interpretation and translation, Jones’s PORT 360 elective is the only class focused entirely on teaching them how to translate and interpret. Jones says this class helps his students learn “how important the role of interpretation is in connecting people across languages and cultures.”
Ethan Harris (Geography and Portuguese ’26), who enrolled in Jones’s course, learned Portuguese as a missionary but wasn’t sure how to keep studying the language at BYU. He says that the support he received in all of his Portuguese classes motivated him to declare the Portuguese major. This translation course, he says, helped him improve his language abilities and gave him opportunities to “see how ideas that I've been studying are being utilized in the real world.”
The Opportunity to Interpret
In February 2026, Jones provided his students with a real-world translation opportunity: the chance to interpret in real time for an academic conference between speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and varieties of Caribbean English.
When Harris first heard about the conference, he was apprehensive, thinking he didn’t have the necessary language skills. But Jones told his students that whatever they could contribute would help people at the conference to “understand exponentially more than they would have otherwise.”
Jones and four of his students, Harris included, interpreted for about ten hours over the course of two days. They accessed the conference remotely over Zoom, taking 30-minute shifts, with Jones mainly covering the English-to-Portuguese interpretation and the students interpreting from Portuguese to English. The experience allowed the students to put into practice the skills and principles they learned in class.
Although interpreting for the conference was hard work, Jones says, “It’s important to be stretched sometimes.” When students take on these kinds of challenging opportunities—even when they don’t feel prepared or capable—Jones has noticed both their confidence and their abilities grow. Harris says that the four hours of the conference he helped with were tiring but worthwhile. This experience, he says, “showed me that there’s so much to learning a language beyond just what we talk about in classes—it really can be applied to the outside world.”
The experience gave Harris a new appreciation for the fact that “language barriers can be broken down to help bring people together and let them exchange ideas with one another.” Jones describes experiences like this one as “a way to build bridges” with language, and he hopes his students learned “the value of interpretation in promoting empathy and belonging across languages.”
Learn more about Portuguese undergraduate studies at BYU here.