Untranslatables
Visto is another legal Portuguese term that makes translators break out in a cold sweat. A Protean beast, visto can be a noun, an adjective, or a conjugated verb – with its nominal form being the hardest to grapple with.
- As a noun, visto is most frequently translated in legal contexts as “approval” or “clearance,” but it can also mean “certificate,” “permit,” “visa,” or “stamp.”
- As an adjective, it means “seen,” but can also mean “noted,” “witnessed,” or even “initialled.” Its plural form, vistos, is a formulaic expression found in court rulings, which can be translated as “The court records having been examined”.
- As a conjugated verb, visto is the past participle of the verb “to see,” as in “X has seen.”
To a Portuguese speaker, the connection between all these meanings is clear – they all ultimately derive from the verb “to see,” metaphorically extended to more abstract affairs (i.e., seeing as approving.) Yet, no single English term covers all three meanings.
As we have seen with other words, sometimes a good option is to leave the Portuguese term untranslated. In this case, however, this cannot be done in all instances, given that visto can perform three different grammatical functions: it would be absurd, for example, to translate the verbal phrase têm visto (“has seen/noted/witnessed/initialed”) as “has visto.” Fortunately, translating the adjectival and verbal forms of visto is fairly straightforward in most contexts.
Still, the nominal form of visto, despite being distinct from its adjectival and verbal forms, can lead to confusion as it covers a range of related yet technical and institution-specific meanings. Within the same set of documents, visto can easily stand for a certificate, a permit, and a visa. For this reason, and to maintain consistency across a translation, lawyers have argued in favor of leaving this form of visto untranslated.