The Brazilian Version of LOGO (Abstract)¹

B. Bitelman, A. F. Gagliardo, A. Ripper and H. Silva and Eduardo O C Chaves

For a Logo learning environment to be as natural as possible for a child, it is necessary that the commands and syntax of the programming language be as close as possible to the child's mother tongue. This fact has motivated the many efforts to translate Logo commands into other natural languages. And to adapt Logo's syntax to that of the natural language in which the commands appear.

In Brazil, we have been using Logo with children since 1976. At first, only error messages were translated in an implementation of Logo which ran on a DEC-1o system. With the appearance of Brazilian-made microcomputer systems, an effort was made by the Nucleus of Informatics Applied to Education (NIED) of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) to implement a full translation on a CP/M-based microcomputer system, the Itautec I-7000, made by a Brazilian manufacturer, Itaú Tecnologia S/A, of São Paulo, Brazil.

This was done with the conviction that the job of translating Logo into Portuguese was not by any means exhausted by converting English words into their Portuguese equivalent; one would also have to take into account the syntactical structure of the Portuguese language. Many examples of such adaptations are provided in the paper, e.g., the use of the infinitive. Also, the Portuguese language uses accents and other signs which are not a part of the standard ASCII code. The translation work was facilitated by six years' experience with using Logo with children at UNICAMP. The children's reaction to many suggested translations (originally implemented as procedures within the English version) were recorded and, on the basis of this material, research was done to implement the full translation.

The work done was also one of the reasons for NIED being selected by the Federal Brazilian Government as one of five centers of excellence in the study of the use of computers in education. A federally sponsored three-year project is under way to introduce Logo to teachers and students of Brazilian public schools.

In conclusion, we now have a CP/M implementation of Logo in Portuguese which fully takes into account the syntactical structure of the Brazilian language.

For further information, pleas contact:

Eduardo O. C. Chaves, Coordinator
NIED, Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Barão Geraldo
13100 Campinas, SP
Brazil

© Copyright by Eduardo Chaves

Last revised: May 02, 2004

¹ Este texto é uma reprodução do publicado em <http://www.chaves.com.br/TEXTSELF/EDTECH/logo85.htm>