> The humour largely arises from Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation
A tradition I really enjoy and deliberately keep alive. For some reason portuguese is incredibly amenable to this no matter the source language.
There's a Chinese in-joke, though, where they like to say "day day up", translating 天天 "every day" as if it were just 天 "day" twice in sequence.
好好学习，天天向上
"Study well, [and] improve every day."
Making progress is conceived of as "upwards" movement.
Same concept exists in brazilian portuguese, at least in certain circles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porglish
> Upar or uppar
> to up (on a level; slang term used for RPG games by Brazilian players, instead of Port. evoluir)
> to upload (instead of rarely used Port. subir – the opposite of baixar, the literal translation of download)
I also really enjoy assembling portuguese words out of japanese phonemes. The pronunciation of japanese and portuguese is remarkably similar and I often find that even the most innocuous japanese vocabulary sounds like portuguese slang or swear words. Sometimes they sound like complete portuguese sentences. The full names of actual japanese people can sometimes be literally transcribed into extremely unfortunate portuguese sentences. Just imagine the amount of bullying targeted at Brazil's immense japanese immigrant population. At least one japanese word -- shoppai -- sounds to me like an english verb but with portuguese conjugation and my brain can't decide whether the radical is shop as in buy or shop as in photoshop, and it's such an archaic imperative first person plural conjugation I can't help but mentally imagine a catholic priest commanding his flock to digitally edit images during a church sermon. And that's the least offensive example I remember off the top of my head.
There used to be a website that would repeatedly pass a body of text through machine translation back and forth until it stabilized on some hilariously distorted result. I wish I could remember the domain name.