Whether your content team writes for São Paulo or Lisbon, Winston AI checks Portuguese text for signs of AI and highlights the sentences that read as machine-written. Here's how the two main varieties differ on the page, what that means for a result, and how to review content adapted from one market to the other.
Two markets, one review process
Plenty of teams publish in both varieties: a Brazilian agency adapting copy for Portugal, a Lisbon publisher commissioning freelancers in Recife. The differences are real. Brazil writes você and estou fazendo; Portugal leans on tu or third-person forms and writes estou a fazer. Spelling still diverges after the 1990 agreement (fato and facto, recepção and receção), and vocabulary splits too: ônibus and autocarro, celular and telemóvel. Formal writing in Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde mostly follows European norms.
Winston AI detects Portuguese automatically and reads both varieties, so paste text as-is. What's worth watching is copy that belongs to neither market. Default AI output in Portuguese often drifts toward a generic register, and a text that mixes Brazilian and European forms in one paragraph can be a sign that pieces were stitched together or adapted by a tool. Worth a look, not a conclusion.
Reviewing localized copy
- Scan the source text and the localized version separately
- Expect some yellow on adapted copy, since rewording by a tool often reads as mixed signals
- Check red highlights against the brief: generic claims, no product detail, no local reference
- Ask the writer for drafts before you decide anything
Teams running this at volume can fit it into the normal edit pass rather than adding a separate gate. Agree up front what happens when a piece comes back mostly red (a rewrite request, a call with the writer) so freelancers in both countries know the rules. Our page for marketers shows how content teams use detection without slowing every article down.