Thursday, July 31, 2008

Malay translated

I was in Dr Wan’s office just now, asking for his assistance to prepare a letter to visit a giant company. He was like “What? Write a letter?”

Until we sat together, finding the right words to create nice sentences…then only he said “Oh..No wonder u asked for my help.” (it's difficult to describe some statements in English)

Then we started rambling desultorily to direct translation from Malay to English.

I said… no guy can ever be proud if he claims that "last night I had a one night stand" as it could mean "semalam saya satu malam berdiri"…Hahaha! It just turns out hilarious!

Another one that I could recall is Joy (my Filipino housemate in BNE). She always swears “Holy crap!” which is literally translated as “tahi suci”.

Inten and I used to make fun of the term by translating it into “Kepiting!” (or ketam –in Bahasa Indonesia) that is crab instead of crap).

Well, Malaysians are just polite or trying to be nice, perhaps.

We sometimes ‘hello’ people with a blatantly obvious question such as “Makan ke?” while the person might be spooning his/her food into his mouth.

And for a gag, one might answer it with a cynical “No, I’m jogging.” Or “No, I’m washing the dishes.” (buat-buat tanya pulak!)

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