Challenges encountered in translation between English and Malay

The Malay language, spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Singapore, has been used as a lingua franca for centuries, yet translation between English and Malay still brings about many challenges for both native English speakers and native Malay speakers because of the vast differences between the two languages.

One difficulty in translation between English and Malay arises in the form of basic vocabulary. As Malay is completely unrelated to English, there are very few cognates (i.e. words that sound similar because of similar histories); only loanwords are likely to sound familiar to English speakers. However, unlike languages such as Japanese, Malay takes relatively few loanwords from English, and even those loanwords undergo spelling changes in order to match the Malay orthography. One would not suspect the word “sains”, for instance, to have come from the English “science.” Many more loanwords come from languages like Arabic and Portuguese, but this is not helpful in translation between English and Malay. Verb conjugation also causes many troubles for English speakers trying to engage in translation between English and Malay. In English, verbs don’t change form nearly as often or in so many varied ways as they do in Malay. English also almost always keeps other parts of speech, such as nouns and adjectives, the same regardless of number; Malay, however, has many different derivations of many different parts of speech. In addition, articles, while relatively simple in English, are much more varied in Malay. This renders translation between English and Malay an extremely delicate process. There are many other grammatical “tics” that exist in Malay that have no counterpart in English, making word-for-word translation difficult. For instance, while English typically adds a letter S onto the end of a noun to make it plural, Malay often repeats the word. A native English speaker might expect “batu-batu” to translate literally as “stone-stone.” but it is in fact the plural form, “stones.” Still other Malay words form plurals by only repeating the beginning sound of the noun. The plural “dedaun” (“leaves”) comes from the singular “daun” (“leaf”). Because the plural is considered an entire word by itself and because it doesn’t start the same way as the singular, English speakers may easily find it unrecognizable as the plural form of “daun.” Like many other languages, Malay has a number of ways to indicate the second-person pronoun, while English only has one: “you.” Once one learns to recognize all the different forms, translating to the English “you” is very simple, but when translating to Malay, English speakers have to be very careful to choose the right form based on factors such as number, formality, gender, and dialect. One element that does make translation between English and Malay easier, however, is that both languages employ the basic Subject-Verb-Object word order. This allows for quicker off-the-cuff translations, unlike in languages such as Hindi, where a sentence might be written in a word-for-word translation as “I you love” instead of the correct English “I love you” or the Malay “Saya cinta awak.” There is no need to mentally reverse the word order before translating; typically, one need only translate each section of a sentence in order to get a good grasp on the general concept in English.

As English and Malay are two languages that are not closely related, there remain great grammatical and cultural divides that can cause linguistic confusion by beginners of the languages. If one is not intimately familiar with the intricacies present in both languages, accurate translation can become impossible. It is therefore important to take great care when attempting translation between English and Malay.