in my city (southeastern Brazil) we have two facilities for public healthcare: the emergency center (UPA - unidade de pronto atendimento, emergency medical unit) and the family health center (UBS - unidade básica de saúde, basic health unit)

at the UBS I can see a doctor or a nurse, get prescriptions, get referred to specialists and exams/tests, IST tests, and so forth, if I’m not in meed of urgent care

at the UPA I can be treated (rather) quickly if I’m in an emergency

a few weeks ago my uncle had a heart attack. it was nothing serious, thankfully. we called the ambulance and in 5 minutes they were here, he was treated quickly, sent to another city nearby for emergency catheterism and angioplasty, and he paid a total amount of zero reais for everything

I love SUS (sistema universal de saúde - universal healthcare system)

yeah, that’s what I heard too

I hope the experience what some kind of catharsis and he’s gonna learn from it

yup, but in this specific context I actually had a prescription from my psychiatrist, who gave it to me to use to kill a bad trip (he is aware me and my bf use magic mushrooms sometimes)

I ended up messaging my doctor, but when he answered my bf was already getting better, so I just took care of him and gave him a half tablet of Seroquel (quetiapine) to sleep, and now he’s good again (that’s what my doctor told me to do)

what a coincidence

I just came out of a trip with my bf

he had a really bad trip, unfortunately. I gave him alprazolam and it did nothing

after about 3-4 hours he got better, took a shower, ate, now he’s sleeping soundly

you’re right, there are translators and translators

that’s why there are expressions such as “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, traitor” in Italian). to translate is to betray the language in a way

I studied translation in college, and sometimes I’ll do translation work as a freelancer. In my opinion it’s really hard for a machine to get the intricacies of translation. it’s not just “convert” from one language to another, there are linguistic devices people use to make writing more “interesting”.

I’ll give two examples

I read this book called Blue Belle in both English (original language) and Portuguese (translation). there’s this bit on the original where the protagonist Belle says

If I were a flower I’d be a bluebell

in Portuguese they just translated the name of the flower into “campanula”. the word trick was completely lost.

another case is that joke “why is 6 afraid of 7? because 7 8 9”. it’s untranslatable into Portuguese, for instance. there’s no way to translate the sound of “seven eight/ate nine”…

a human translator will try to find a way to at least explain it to the reader, sometimes via a footnote, but a machine won’t be able to do it