Forms of address, “the main linguistic means of addressing specific interlocutors” (Faria 2019: 72), are a notoriously complex element in Portuguese that is not only restricted to translating these forms into other languages, but also to teaching them, both to learners of Portuguese as a foreign language and to native speakers themselves (Duarte 2010). In European Portuguese, when addressing a single interlocutor, ‘tu’ and ‘você’ are found in complementary distribution, depending on the type of relationship between them: informal/formal, symmetrical/asymmetrical, close/distant (Nascimento, Mendes, Duarte 2018: 245). However, according to the authors, there is already a widespread use of ‘você’ not only “among the less educated classes” but also among “some people from the younger generations” (2018: 251). In fact, this seems to be a trend among young people - to eliminate hierarchical differences between interlocutors - as Bruns and Kranick (2021) point out in their contrastive study of forms of address in British, American, Indian English and German, which could be the result of globalisation and democratisation. The aim of this paper is to identify and analyse the translation choices made by mostly Italian-speaking learners of Portuguese as a foreign language when translating the forms of address used in the Brazilian animated film Brichos - a floresta é nossa (Munhoz 2012) into Italian. The corpus being analysed consists of 9 translation proposals produced by B1-level students (according to the CEFR) enrolled in the course Lingua e Traduzione Portoghese II.
