Much more than “a small notion of tiny houses for smaller stature people” as one reads in online reviews, “Portugal dos Pequenitos”, in Coimbra, was designed by Bissaya Barreto with the help of architect Cassiano Brando and built from 1940 until 1950 as propaganda for the Portuguese colonial empire. This precursor of children’s theme parks is a miniature village that holds small scale reproductions of Portugal’s traditional regional homes, of the most important Portuguese monuments and as well as an overseas area with buildings dedicated to the Portuguese former colonies. The buildings in this third area hold a collection of items related to each one of the current African Countries with Portuguese as official language. Plaques describing the different spaces and cultures have been subject to intralingual translation that the ideological change in Portugal made necessary. This paper analyses a selection of these texts and their underlying translational strategies that change propaganda into apology.