"Exceto pelos sapatos"

Translation: Except for the shoes

[simoellila]

What does this sentence mean exactly? I dont understand why the "for" is there..

[Davu]

Greetings to Finland. This could be a fragment of a longer sentence, for example: "He looked a picture of elegance - except for the shoes". The word pelos in Portuguese is a contraction of "por os" and one of the meanings of "por" is "for" and that's why the translation makes sense.

[simoellila]

Thanks! I must have been half asleep, it seems so obvious now (I mean "pelos" = "for the"). But I still think they should not use fragments of sentences as examples.. I often make mistakes not because I can't translate, but because the fragment alone seems to make no sense.

[maryanfirpo]

A good hint is, when they use sentence fragments, they never end in punctuation marks. No period/question mark/exclamation point, no full sentence. Those are the ones with which you should be most literal.