Case study: Portuguese

With over 170 million speakers of European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, this language is increasingly in demand by business people who want to communicate with their colleagues and clients.

Although there are differences between the European and Brazilian versions of Portuguese, speakers from both countries communicate with each other without the slightest difficulty – rather similar to English and American.

CLT have worked extensively teaching Brazilian Portuguese to members of staff from companies like The Balmoral Group, Shell and Nautronix at their Aberdeen sites – to prepare key employees for their work within the oil and gas industry with links to Brazil.  Aberdeen has long been linked with the Brazilian energy industry and companies based there are increasingly building up working relationships with Brazil-based enterprises.

The Macquarie Group, global provider of banking, financial, advisory, investment and funds management services, also called on the language expertise of CLT when key employees decided to book weekly lessons in business Portuguese.  The delegates were so impressed by the quality of the training that several repeat business Portuguese courses were booked with CLT.

A technical trainer from Apple, who was responsible for delivering training on Iphone devices to technicians in Portugal, undertook a one week intensive business Portuguese course with CLT and gave excellent feedback:

The CLT tutor has been wonderful for the whole week and completely customised the training for me. Towards the end I felt much more confident to travel to Portugal and start talking with the people. I am really looking forward to it.

Technical Trainer, Apple

Other companies who have turned to CLT in the past to learn Brazilian Portuguese include Runcorn-based Vantrunk, Nokia in London and Balfour Beatty in Derby.