colaborador

Colaborador is a noun used in Spanish and Portuguese to denote a person who collaborates with others on a common task or project. It signals a cooperative or contributory role and is commonly preferred in professional and organizational contexts to emphasize partnership rather than hierarchy.

In Spanish, the term can refer to a staff member who contributes to a team's work, a volunteer who assists with activities, or an external partner who provides services or expertise. The feminine form is colaboradora, and the plural forms are colaboradores or colaboradoras depending on gender. In journalism, a colaborador de prensa denotes a contributor who writes articles or provides reports.

In Portuguese, especialmente in Brazil, colaborador has a similar range and is used for colleagues, partners, or workers who contribute to a project. It can describe employees, collaborators in research or community initiatives, or a contractor who provides specialized input. The phrase colaborador externo may be used to indicate an external contractor or consultant.

Context and nuance: while often interchangeable with terms like employee or worker in everyday speech, col aborador emphasizes a cooperative, non-exclusively hierarchical relationship. The word appears across domains such as business, media, academia, NGOs, and open-source projects, where individuals contribute knowledge, skills, or labor to a shared objective.

See also: collaboration, colaboration (in Spanish and Portuguese equivalents), and related terms for teamwork and contribution. The gender of the term varies by language and grammatical gender, with forms including colaborador, colaboradora in both Spanish and Portuguese.