Felipe, our Editor Highlight this month, is Brazilian and has been working for Unbabel for four years now translating English to Brazilian Portuguese and vice-versa. That’s a long time to work at Unbabel! Especially since he started because one of his best friends told him “Let’s travel the world!” and he looked online for a way to make money to travel.

Even though he also works as an English and History teacher, at the beginning of the pandemic his job as a teacher fell through, and Unbabel became more of a full-time job. Felipe, who’s quick to share that he’s a Scorpio, says that correcting translations done by a machine doesn’t bother him “because my moon is in Aquarius, and we’re usually people who like futuristic things.”

We asked Felipe if he ever came across funny translations while working for Unbabel. He told us that Tinder support tickets usually make him smile, especially one time that he saw a person asking for their account to be deleted since they’d found their soulmate ❤️

We couldn’t let Felipe go without asking him a bit about Brazilian culture. He told me that the one Brazilian expression that he thinks everyone in the world could use is “Eita!”. “It’s said everywhere in Brazil. There’s no meaning, you can’t translate it. We use “Eita” to express surprise, joy, worry. It’s a word that can be used in every situation.”

Finally, we all know that Brazilians have the best memes. So we asked Felipe for some #relatable memes that remind him of being an editor at Unbabel, and he did not disappoint:

Working from home as an editor

How Felipe has to work when his little dog, Polar, wants attention

Felipe’s Tip Top Tips 📝

• Find ways to keep motivated and organized
• Pro tip: track your earnings and know how much you need to work to reach your goals!
• If you’re working on too many tasks, remember to blink! Look away from the screen and get a glass of water
• Enjoy yourself! Editing for a while can get boring, especially if you are a people-person like Felipe
• Pro tip: Felipe fights boredom with vintage Brazilian music in the background
• Take special care with the blue box, AKA the glossary terms, as they may show up in the wrong order
• Don’t trust the machine-translated text, always check the source text!