Mind the translation!

This evening as I was riding on the train, I noticed the usual warning 'Mind the gap' translated into Malay. Although I have no scholastic expertise in Malay grammar, and Malay isn't my native language, I have a reasonable grasp of it and I can analyse its nahu with reasonable competence. And the translation is wrong.

I've always preferred Malay to Indonesian, the latter of which incorporates too many Dutch words in the past and many English words more recently. Many of these English words are butchered in the most ghastly manner as they are Indonesianised. Recently the hideous 'spasi' is coined for the space bar on your keyboard. It took me a long time to understand what the Indonesian restaurant waitress meant when she gave me the password to the WiFi network. 

There is a greater tendency for the Malay language to be slightly more descriptive when it has to come up with the name of a newly invented object whereas Bahasa Indonesia simply mispronounces the English word and recasts it in basic Indonesian orthography. The beautiful Malay word ‘pelancung’ for 'tourists' is never used in Indonesia. Instead, they coin the word ‘wisata’ which is of course nothing more than a ridiculous mispronunciation of the word ‘visitor’. 

Another word that comes to mind is 'refrigerator' which is 'koelkast' in Dutch and 'kulkas' in Indonesian. In Malay, it's 'peti sejuk' which means 'cold box', a purely descriptive term.

Sometimes, the Indonesian ignorance of how an English word is properly pronounced can be seen in its adoption of some common English words, e.g. 'sauce' is spelt 'saus' and is pronounced to rhyme with 'house'. Malay also uses the same English word but it's spelt 'sos' and has a pronunciation that more closely resembles the original English word.

But Malay has its limitations too. Look at this translation of 'Mind the gap'. It’s virtually impossible to say that in Malay. The translation does not mean the same thing at all. There is no real word for ‘gap’ in Malay. ‘Ruang’ can sometimes carry that meaning but it usually does not and ‘ruang platform’ certainly cannot mean the gap between the train and the platform. 

‘Ruang’ can loosely be translated as ‘space’ but it has a very different connotation from ‘gap’. Neither can it be used to replace that abominable Indonesian word ‘spasi’. You can’t say ‘ruang’ when you want someone to press the space bar to create a space. That’s not how ‘ruang’ can be interpreted. 

‘Ruang platform’ actually means the space where the platform is, i.e., the whole platform and not the tiny gap between the train and the platform. That is the idea of ‘space’ in the word ‘ruang’. Hence, the sitting room is called ‘ruang tamu’ or ‘ruang tetamu’ which can be directly translated as ‘the guests’ space’, and of course the sitting room is where your guests are invited to. 

Because of this, ‘Berhati-hati di ruang platform’ does not mean ‘Mind the gap’ but literally, ‘Be careful when on the platform’. That is all it means and nothing more. It’s that ambiguous. The warning that you must not step into the gap between the train and the platform is not at all conveyed in this translation. It simply tells the reader to be careful when he is ON the platform. The Malay preposition ‘di’ makes it indisputable that what I have said is correct. ‘Di’ can only be translated ‘in, at or on’. In this instance, it’s best translated ‘on’. If ‘ruang platform’ really meant ‘gap’ which it clearly does not, the preposition ‘di’ would not have been used. You can’t be ‘on, in or at’ the gap. Instead of ‘di’, the proper preposition would have been ‘dengan’ or ‘terhadap’ if indeed ‘ruang platform’ meant ‘gap’.

Perhaps, the translators should just get rid of ‘ruang platform’ and use the same word ‘gap’. Then only can the warning be effective. ‘Berhati-hati dengan gap’ or ‘Berhati-hati terhadap gap’.

NOTE: A trip to the birthplace of the Malay language led me to publish Mind the Translation Part 2 and a subsequent attempt to correct the error by SMRT is addressed in Mind the Translation Part 3.