Analysis of The Problems in The Process of Translating from Malay to English

Introducition

The main reason I chose this text is because I believe there are enough materials for me to talk about in this paper. As said by Brook (2012), Translation has always been the texts themselves as well as the issues from translating it to a target language. Therefore, in this essay I will discuss the problems I have encountered during the process of translating it from Malay to English in which Azmi et al, (2016) state that as the languages of the world evolve as time goes by, each language has their own unique structures which makes them distinctive from one another.

The article I chose is titled as, ‘Four members of PPPBD left for Singapore’ and was written on 30th August 2018 by author, Salawati Haji Yahya. The capability to make correct translation is a vital skill for translators, therefore, for this essay I have decided to translate this freely, depending on its context, as my intended audience is the public residing in Brunei Darussalam.

Statistical Comparison

The data for both Malay and English text were analyzed on Microsoft Excel. There are three parts for Statistical Comparison. First of all is the analysis for word length, based on my calculations the average word length for Malay is 6.22 while English is 5.33. From these numbers alone, one could see that Malay words are slightly longer than those in English. To further explain the claim made, the chart in Figure (1) shows that Malay has more five letter words, 58 words in total, than in English most of the words under this category are prepositions such as ‘dalam’ and ‘untuk’ as well as nouns, some of them are ‘Pandu’ and the name acronym ‘PPPBD’. While for English, they have more three letter words, a total of 64 words, which are mostly determiners ‘the’ and connectors ‘and’.

The difference of word length between the two languages is found to be significantly different with values (p= 0.000064, df= 648, t= 4.02). With this, the findings prove that Malay does have more words in comparison to English.

Secondly comes the statistics for Sentence analysis. There are less paragraphs within the Malay text rather than the English one, however, the average sentence length for English is 26.2 while Malay is 28.4. A variance in values can be seen between the two because English texts tend to be broken up more as they need subordinating conjunctions in order to connect the sentences together. In spite of the dissimilarity, there is no significance difference for the sentence lengths based on my calculation (p = 0.43, df = 22, t= 0.81).

This might be due to the fact that English has only extra two sentences than Malay. Lastly, the analysis of three letter words. From my calculations, there are only 28 three letter words for Malay while English has more than Malay with 64 three letter words. For both languages the words with three characters are mostly connectors but even so English has more connectors in its text than Malay. According to its percentages, 9.0% of the Malay text are three letter words while 18.9% of three letter words cover the English text.

Lexis

The title prefixed for a woman name in Malay, ‘Dayang’ is generally used as a label for women. It is usually applied during formal situations such as in newspaper articles, radio programs, ceremonies and so on. In this case, an English equivalent for ‘Dayang’ is Miss or Ms. This is because ‘Dayang’ is considered to be a superordinate since it can be used for both unmarried or married woman.

In the English translation I have retained the title as I think it suits the text the best as I would not like to assume the woman to have wedded or not. Similar to ‘Dayang’, the name ‘Hajah’ is given to people who have successfully performed their Hajj pilgrimage and are specifically given to females.

Also, this label does not have an English equivalent therefore there might be misunderstandings in translation as one who does not know the meaning behind the title ‘Hajah’ in which may cause the reader to assume it to be the first name of that person as it comes before their first name hence it is reasonable to leave it as it is. As for ‘binti’, it does not seem correct to translate it as the ‘daughter of’ so it is best to keep it as it is for the translation. In the Malay article there is also an acronym for an organization which is written as PPPBD, which is the Malay acronym for World Wide Organization for Girl Guides.

The problem here is that if I were to preserve the Malay acronym there is a chance that the public would not understand it. Even if I do change it as WWOGG, the reader would also not understand what the acronym stands for unless an explanation was to be given before it. In the end I have decided to keep it as it is as I believe the readers who are interested in the article would be those having interest in Girl Guides hence would know the lingo.

Another title that has raised an issue is ‘Dayangku’, as explained earlier in this paragraph ‘Dayang’ is a label generally used for women but for ‘Dayangku’ despite having the word ‘Dayang’ embedded in it, the affix –ku changes its meaning. The name ‘Dayangku’ is given to daughters of noble families who are considered to be distant relatives of the royal family and unlike Dayang, it does not have an English equivalent hence the title is retained as it is.

Another problem would be the word Pandu Puteri. If it were to be literally translated it would be Drive Princess or Guide Princess but there is an English term for it which are either Girl Guides or Girl Scouts. The Malay phrase for Girl Guides, Pandu Puteri, is contradicting to what they are doing since activities for Girl Guides are usually hands on conducts but Princesses, as we know them to be, do not, therefore, it is rather confusing as to why Malay calls them as Princesses.

Syntax

Pronouns

For this article, there were not many pronouns that were used. Only three pronouns were seen. The first one is the suffix -nya in the word ‘Jelasnya’. Jelasnya in this context is translated as ‘She explained’. I have used ‘She’ as it points to the subject mentioned before which is a female. Another reason why I chose to use ‘She’ rather than ‘He’ is because the article is only talking about Girl Guides and the respective organizations so it is safe to assume that all parties involved are of the female population.

The second pronoun used is ‘Ia’. ‘Ia’ in this article refers to the competition that was being held in Singapore. This might be the effort made by the author to avoid lexical repetition hence the use of pronouns unlike the pronoun mentioned before this but in the English translation there is no use of pronouns as it is translated as ‘The competition’. Finally, ‘mereka’ is another pronoun found. ‘Mereka’ points to the members of the organization in spite of the article centered mostly on the associates the use of ‘mereka’ might be another attempt made by the author to not be perceived as repetitive or the use of pronouns is much less difficult than mentioning the name of the subject all the time.

Plurals

There are differences in plurality between English and Malay. As for the former, in order to change singular nouns to a plural form is by adding the ‘-s’ at the end example are cats while for the latter language, we do not add the ‘-s’ to change it into a plural form, rather, by using the term ‘banyak’ instead. In the first paragraph rather than using ‘banyak’ there is a number which signifies the noun to be in plural form. ‘Empat orang ahli’ translates to ‘four members’ but in Malay ‘Ahli’ only denotes a member while ‘Ahli-ahli’ means members so naturally the quantifier before it ‘empat’, which means four, gives further context that there are four members representing the country and thus indicates Ahli is a plural noun in English. Other than that, there are more issues of the article in which the author does not use reduplicative words.

In Malay, reduplicative words are used as plural words but there are instances when one does not use it for example, Fakta. Fakta in the third last paragraph when translated to English is a plural noun, Facts. It is appropriate to translate it as such due to the context where the girl scouts were to be tested on facts regarding Girl Guides and or Girl Scouts. Next, ‘Wakil negara’ means Representatives of the country, without the anaphoric reference ‘Empat orang ahli’ the reader might only think there is only one member representing Brunei as ‘Wakil’ means Representative.

Tenses

In general, there were difficulties faced, specifically in terms of tense, when translating Malay to the target language since in Malay, there are no changes towards the root verb as we use another term to show what has happened in the past, present or future. For translations from English to Malay time reference are considered to be an issue where it may cause vague definitions after translation. For this translation, I decided to use past tense as well as present tense despite the date of the writing was released since the competition mentioned has not occurred when this article was made. All in all, the concept of tenses is different for each language.

In English there are two tenses, the past and the present and which the words are usually morphologically marked with -ed and -s respectively in which is also explained in Azmi et al., (2016) research where they state that tense is different in English as usually, to show a past tense the suffix ‘-ed’ is added. As for Malay, tenses are determined by the use of suffixes or prefixes.

Azmi et al., (2016) shows the usage of prefixes and suffixes are different in Malay and English due to the meaning of a basic verb with prefix in Malay means the opposite when it is with prefix in English. For instance, ‘Menjelaskan’, ‘jelas’ is the basic word for explain while the suffixes Men- and kan- changes the tense of the word to: Explained while if to literally translate ‘jelas’ it means ‘clear’ but when suffix ‘ing- is added it turns to ‘clearing’ which can denote a large, empty field or the verb to clear matters away. To add, the verb ‘left’ was translated from ‘Berlepas’ in which the prefix Ber- provides indication that the action has happened before. Not only there are presence of time indicators that indicate the future but there are some that helps to indicate an action happened in the past.

According to Young (2001), ‘sudah’, ‘pernah’, and ‘telah’ function as aspect verbs of an action completed during the time of utterance in Malay. An example can be seen in the text, ‘Telah melakukan’ means ‘Have made’. ‘Telah’ here indicates the preceding verb happened in the past. Besides indicators of the past there are also time indicators for the future which is ‘akan’.

Similar cases can be found throughout the article such as, ‘Menjadikan’, where ‘jadi’ is the basic form meaning: Become, but in this example the word that comes before ‘Menjadikan’ is ‘akan’ which acts as aspect verbs to convey the meaning that it will happen in the future hence ‘Menjadikan’ is translated as: ‘Will make’

Articles

In English grammar, there are two types of determiners that must always come before a count noun which is the definite and indefinite articles ‘a, an and also the’. While for the Malay language, articles are non-existent hence in the English translation there were some instances where I need to add articles. For example, ‘Di Lapangan Terbang’ was translated to ‘At the airport’, the article was added here as to indicate the specific referent, Brunei International Airport, as the reader might know there is only one International Airport in Brunei.

Passives

Passive words work differently in Malay, where Razak, Jin, Woan and Aziz (2016) state that the mostly found passive is the di- prefix, which are commonly found in standard Malay, but of course not all case are as such. In the English language, a passive voice is used when the user wants to know what happened and who caused or did it text there were a number of passive words which can be seen that are rather straightforward when translating but a few has raised some issues and hence I had to make a decision yet again to decide which is the best to be used in my English translation.

An example of those that are easy to translate are, ‘Diketuai’, according to the context of the article the event is still ongoing hence ‘Diketuai’ is translated as ‘Is led’. Another one would be, ‘Dianjurkan’. The situation is the same as ‘diketuai’ hence it is translated as ‘Is held’. One of the problems I faced was the word, ‘Ditetapkan’. ‘Ditetapkan’ made me go through my options as, if it were to be translated literally would mean ‘chosen’. The sentence which contains this word is as follows, ‘tema yang ditetapkan’. My problem here is whether the theme was chosen beforehand and contestants were told about it or the themes were to be chosen during the competition. Therefore, to avoid confusion I chose to translate it as, ‘a chosen theme’.

Discourse

Word order

Word order differs for each language. For instance, in English there is a Subject Verb Object word order where the subject precedes the verb, which foregoes the object. According to Deterding (2018), English is not an end-weight language, therefore ‘Today’ was put at the beginning of the sentence which is different from the Malay text as the author decided to put it in the middle of the sentence in which Deterding (2018) further explains that Malay adverbials for time commonly occurs at the end. Not only for adverbials, difference in word order also happen in noun phrases such as ‘Lapangan Terbang Antarabangsa Brunei’ was rearranged and translated to ‘Brunei International Airport’ and ‘Khemah Christine’ to ‘Christine Camp’. In addition, adjectives in English always forego a noun as the function of adjectives are to describe the noun that precedes it but for Malay it is quite different.

In a research made by Chiew (1999) he explains that Malay language makes use of other words such as suffixes to indicate a certain word to be an adjective or to just preserve the root word and let the other words in the sentence to explain its function as an adjective. An example of such is, ‘Pertandingan berpasukan’, when translated to English is, ‘Group competition’, Group here is describing the nature of the competition is to be done by teams of more than one person. Another example is the noun phrase, ‘Responsible residents of the Brunei and the world’, Responsible here, yet again, acts as an adjective that describes the personality of the residents as responsible. The initial text is as follows, ‘warganegara Brunei dan dunia yang bertanggungjawab’ where the word ‘yang’ here acts as indicator that ‘bertanggungjawab’ is an adjective.

Lexical repetition

Reduplication of nouns, verbs or even adjectives can often be found in Malay texts as they seem to not bother if there is any repetition of words in their writings but it is completely different for English. Texts written in English do have words that are quite similar used throughout but in order to avoid lexical repetition writers tend to find the synonym of the words. For this translation, some synonyms for nouns are used such as Contest and Competition for ‘Pertandingan’ while synonyms of ‘Ahli’ can be Member or Associates. Furthermore, similar words that can replace not only nouns but verbs as well, for instance, ‘Meningkatkan’ can be translated to either Increase or Improve but Nadiah et al (2016) states that the translated definition of a text might not be accurate as the original one hence the same meaning could not be conveyed.

Reduplicatives

In the Malay text, I have found a number of reduplicated nouns but during translation I have found English words which does not need reduplication. Mattiello (2013) state that the reduplicates used in Malay denotes a plural form of a word or a semantic change. She then further explained the reduplicatives in present-time English are usually associated with language spoken by children, in other words, babbling. Therefore, this supports my claim, where is there is no reduplicatives present in English. So, in order to indicate plurality of a word they must be morphologically attached with -s at the end of the word.

Paragraph length

Nurkhalisah (2013) clarifies that it is not certain Malay texts have more words than English but they have the tendency to possess more morphemes. The English paragraphs are now shorter than the ones in Malay hence paragraphs 3 and 4 could be combined together as paragraph 4 only contains a statement. While for paragraphs 6 and 7 can also be merged as the translated version of paragraph 6 is too short to be a paragraph on its own but even so, I have decided to keep the same number of paragraphs as in the initial text as it might be easier for the reader to fully comprehend the story of the article.

Conclusion

As both the Malay and English language are different in terms of grammar, syntax and even discourse, there are bound to be grammatical and cultural differences which can cause linguistic confusion to translators who translate texts from one language to a target language. I believe that this translation is a quite successful attempt of mine yet I do know there are other weaknesses within the text that have yet to be discussed about. A number of the issues is the ability to provide an in depth explanation of each category mentioned above, the need for more references and readings as well.