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  • Essay / Analysis of the problems in the process of translation from Malay to English

    Table of contentsIntroductionStatistical comparisonLexisSyntaxSpeechConclusionIntroductionThe main reason why I chose this text is because I think there is enough material for me to talk about it in this article. As Brook (2012) says, translation has always been the text itself as well as the problems associated with translating it into a target language. Therefore, in this essay, I will discuss the problems I encountered during the process of translating from Malay to English in which Azmi et al (2016) state that as the world's languages ​​evolve over time , each language has its own language. have unique structures that distinguish them from each other. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get an original essayThe article I chose is titled “Four PPPBD members left for Singapore” and was written on August 30 2018 by author Salawati Haji. Yahya. The ability to make a correct translation is a vital skill for translators. Therefore, for this essay, I decided to translate it freely, according to its context, because my target audience is the public residing in Brunei Darussalam. Statistical comparisonThe data for the Malay and English texts were analyzed on Microsoft Excel. There are three parts for the statistical comparison. Firstly, word length analysis, based on my calculations, the average word length for Malay is 6.22 while English is 5.33. From these numbers alone, we can see that Malay words are slightly longer than English ones. To further explain the statement made, the table in Figure (1) shows that Malay has more five-letter words, making 58 words in total, than English. Most of the words in this category are prepositions such as "dalam" and "untuk" as well as nouns, some of them are "Pandu" and the acronym "PPBD". Whereas for English, they have more three-letter words, making a total of 64 words, which are mostly “the” determiners and “and” connectives. The difference in word length between the two languages ​​was found to be significantly different with values ​​(p= 0.000064, df= 648, t= 4.02). With this, the results prove that Malay has more words than English. Second comes statistics for sentence analysis. There are fewer paragraphs in the Malay text than in the English text. However, the average sentence length in English is 26.2 while in Malay it is 28.4. A variation in values ​​can be seen between the two as English texts tend to be more divided as they need subordinating conjunctions in order to link sentences together. Despite the dissimilarity, there is no significant difference for sentence length based on my calculation (p = 0.43, df = 22, t = 0.81). This could be because English has only two more sentences than Malay. Finally, the analysis of three letter words. According to 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, three-character words are mostly connectives, but English nevertheless has more connectives in its text than Malay. According to its percentages, 9.0% of the Malay text are three-letter words while 18.9% of the three-letter words cover the English text.LexisThe prefix title for a female name in Malay, "Dayang" is generally used as a label for women. It is generally applied during formal situations such as innewspaper articles, radio programs, ceremonies, etc. In this case, an English equivalent of "Dayang" is Miss or Ms. Indeed, "Dayang" is considered superior since it can be used for a married or single woman. In the English translation I have kept the title as I think best suits the text as I would not want to assume whether the woman married or not. Similar to "Dayang", the name "Hajah" is given to people who have successfully completed their Hajj.pilgrimage and is specifically given to women. Additionally, this label does not have an English equivalent, so there could be misunderstandings in the translation as one who does not know the meaning of the title "Hajah", which could lead the reader to assume that it is This person's first name precedes their first name, so it is reasonable to leave it as is. As for "binti", it does not seem correct to translate it as "daughter of", so it is better to keep it as is for the translation. In the Malay article, there is also an acronym for an organization which is spelled PPPBD, which is the Malay acronym for World Wide Organization for Girl Guides. The problem here is that if I were to keep the Malay acronym, there is a chance that the public would not understand. Even if I change it to WWOGG, the reader also wouldn't understand what the acronym means unless an explanation is given first. In the end, I decided to keep it as is, because I think the readers interested in the article would be those who are interested in the guides and therefore would know the jargon. Another title that raised a problem is "Dayangku", as explained earlier in this paragraph, "Dayang" is a label generally used for women, but for "Dayangku", although the word "Dayang" is embedded in it, the affix –ku changes meaning. The name "Dayangku" is given to daughters of noble families who are considered distant relatives of the royal family and unlike Dayang, it has no English equivalent, so the title is retained as is. Another problem would be the word Pandu. Puteri. If it were to be translated literally it would be Drive Princess or Guide Princess, but there is an English term for this which is either Girl Guides or Girl Scouts. The Malay expression for guides, Pandu Puteri, contradicts what they do since activities for guides are generally practical conducts, but princesses, as we know them, do not, therefore, it is rather confusing why the malays. calls them Princesses.SyntaxPronounsFor this article, few pronouns were used. Only three pronouns were seen. The first is the suffix -nya in the word “Jelasnya”. Jelasnya in this context is translated as “She explained”. I used “She” because it refers to the previously mentioned subject who is a woman. Another reason I chose to use “She” rather than “He” is that the article only talks about the Girl Guides and their respective organizations. It is therefore reasonable to assume that all parties involved belong to the female population. The second pronoun used is 'I'. “Ia” in this article refers to the competition which took place in Singapore. This could be the effort made by the author to avoid lexical repetition, hence the use of pronouns unlike the previously mentioned pronoun, 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' refers to the members of the organization despite the article mainly focusing on the associates, the use of 'mereka' could be another attempt made by the author to not be perceived as repetitive or the useof pronouns is much less difficult than mentioning the subject's name all the time. Plural There are plurality differences between English and Malay. As for the first, to change singular nouns to plural we must add the “-s” at the end, for example are cats while for the second language we do not add the “-s” to change it to plural. rather form using the term “banyak”. In the first paragraph, rather than using "banyak", there is a number which means the noun is plural. "Empat orang ahli" translates to "four limbs", but in Malay "Ahli" means only one limb while "Ahli-ahli" means members so naturally the quantifier before "empat", meaning four, gives context additional that there are four. members representing the country and thus indicates that Ahli is a plural noun in English. Apart from this, there are more issues of the article in which the author does not use reduplicative words. In Malay, reduplicative words are used in the plural, but there are cases where they are not used, for example Fakta. Fakta in the penultimate paragraph, when translated into English, is a plural noun, Facts. It is appropriate to translate it this way because of the context in which the Girl Scouts were to be tested on facts about Girl Guides and/or Girl Scouts. Then, “Wakil negara” means Representatives of the country, without the anaphoric reference “Empat orang ahli”, the reader could only think that there is only one member representing Brunei since “Wakil” means Representative. In terms of tense, when translating from Malay to the target language, because in Malay there is no change to the verb root because we use another term to show what happened in the past, the present or the future. For English to Malay translations, time reference is considered a problem as it can result in vague definitions after translation. For this translation, I decided to use the past tense as well as the present tense despite the publication date of the writing since the competition mentioned had not taken place at the time of writing this article. Overall, the concept of time is different for each language. In English, there are two tenses, past and present, and words are usually marked morphologically with -ed and -s respectively, which is also explained in Azmi et al. ., (2016) research in which they state that the tense is different in English as usual, 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) show that the use of prefixes and suffixes is different in Malay and English due to the meaning of a base verb with prefix in Malay means the opposite when it is with prefix in English. For example, 'Menjelaskan', 'jelas' is the base word to explain while the suffixes Men- and kan- change the tense of the word to: Explained while if to literally translate 'jelas' it means 'clear' but when the suffix 'ing- is added, it turns into "compensation", which can designate a large empty field or the verb to put things in order. Additionally, the verb "left-handed" was translated from "Berlepas", in which the prefix Ber- indicates that the action occurred previously. Not only are there time indicators that point to the future, but there are also ones that help indicate that an action occurred in the past. According to Young (2001), “sudah”, “pernah” and “telah” function as aspect verbs. of an action performed during the utterance time in Malay. An example can be seen in the text, “Telah melakukan” means “To have done”. “Telah” here indicates that the verbprecedent occurred in the past. Besides the indicators of the past, there are also time indicators for the future which are “akan”. Similar cases can be found throughout the article, such as "Menjadikan", where "jadi" is the base form meaning: To become, but in this example the word 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 do" articles In English grammar, there are two types of determiners. this must always precede a count noun which is the definite and indefinite articles “a, an and also the”. Whereas for the Malay language, articles are non-existent, so in the English translation, there were cases where I had to add articles. For example, "Di Lapangan Terbang" was translated as "At the airport", the article was added here to indicate the specific referent, Brunei International Airport, as the reader may know that it does not There is only one international airport in Brunei.PassivesPassive words function differently in Malay, where Razak, Jin, Woan, and Aziz (2016) state that the most commonly found passive is the prefix di-, which is commonly found in standard Malay, but of course not all cases are as such. In English, a passive voice is used when the user wants to know what happened and who caused or did the text. There are a number of passive words that can be seen and are quite straightforward when translating, but a few have raised issues and so I have had to make the decision again to decide which one is best to use in my English translation. An example of those that are easy to translate is “Diketuai”, depending on the context of the article the event is still ongoing. this is why “Diketuai” is translated as “Is led”. Another would be “Dianjurkan”. The situation is the same as for “diketuai”, which is why it is translated as “is detained”. One of the problems I faced was the word “Ditetapkan”. “Ditetapkan” made me review my options because, if it were to be translated literally, it would mean “chosen.” The sentence that contains this word is: “tema yang ditetapkan”. My issue here is whether the theme was chosen in advance and the candidates were informed about it or whether the themes had to be chosen during the competition. Therefore, to avoid confusion, I have chosen to translate it as "a chosen theme".SpeechWord orderWord order differs for each language. For example, in English there is a Subject Verb Object word order in which the subject precedes the verb, which forgoes the object. According to Deterding (2018), English is not a final weight language, therefore "Today" was put at the beginning of the sentence, which is different from the Malay text since the author decided to put it in the middle of the sentence in which Deterding (2018) further explains that Malay adverbials for time usually appear at the end. Not only for adverbials, the difference in word order also occurs in noun phrases such as "Lapangan Terbang Antarabangsa Brunei" was rearranged and translated to "Brunei International Airport" and "Khemah Christine" to "Christine Camp ". Additionally, adjectives in English always forgo a noun as their function is to describe the noun that precedes it, but for Malay it is entirely different. In a research done by Chiew (1999), he explains that the Malay language uses other words. such as suffixes to indicate that a certain word is an adjective or simply to retain the root of the word and let the other words in the sentence explain its function as an adjective. An example is “Pertandingan.