hey, fiction writers/game designers/worldbuilders/etc
brazil is not a hispanic country
we do not speak spanish
"hernandez" is not a brazilian surname
*starts worrying about her own efforts in this arena, despite it being only peripheral characters involved in the whole book*
(I think I researched it enough, hope I did, probably Ameri-failed pretty hard tho)
I researched somewhat deeply namewise, enough that when I tried to create another character who was a viewpoint character in a short fiction in a very different setting with a Brazilian name I at least knew what I was looking for and (again hopefully) it came out as something plausible, esp in a future setting as opposed to a present-day one
some Google Maps street views, some research into the time of year and the political and law enforcement structures of the area
so I guess?
I went past that into family history of the area and larger structures of names and how they're commonly used for civil servants/officeholders
I did use Google Translate for the small amount of Brazilian Portuguese that's in it, but I did that to fact-check a pair of sources for Brazilian slang phrases and common usage
and I limited THAT to one actual line, IIRC, or possibly two (but one was a simple "thank you" and not a vulgar one -- vulgarities are complex and need more care)
I mean, honestly, I wasn't "trying to do better than 90%", I was trying to do my best and I wanted it to come out decent
so I wanted it to make sense
so I needed it to be very close to the current-day Sao Paulo, since the setting wasn't extremely divergent in terms of those things at the time
@sydneyfalk the specific case that upset me and prompted that toot could've been mitigated by a simple visit to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_common_surnames_in_South_America#Brazil
so yeah you're probably miles ahead