Oh My Language
All our staff are locals and mostly comes from the village where we installed the Micro hidro project.
Koto was so eager to learn Bahasa Melayu that when she have no one to ask to translate, she use the Google Translate apps. There this one time we chat in our staff Whatsapp group saying that "Topo mau bayar bill air, tu empangan mau pecah sudah", which actually means "Topo, our staff wants to go back to his village to be with his wife who he have not seen for months".
She copied and pasted to Google Translate and it comes out like this.
"Topo want to pay water bill, the dam broke out already".
Then she asked us in the group "Why Topo want to pay the water bill??
We all just laughed.
Then there's one time my boss typed "tu kerbau mau tarik dulu baru buat kerja.." means don't be like the buffulo, you drag them then they do the work. My boss wants our staff to be independent and have some initiative to finish the work assigned to them.
Somehow, Koto googled translate like this
"the buffalo would like to drag it first to work"
Then she commented "I dont understand... We need Buffalo to finish the task?"
We just laughed and explained the meaning to her then she understood.
Google Translate is a powerful and helpful tools but the translation can be misleading sometime.
Haha, I use Google translate quite often especially when I talked with my Filipino friends. Amazingly, they impressed with how I can speak Tagalog fluently. But I do agree with you. It can be misleading sometimes. I guess you can't really rely 100% on Google translate.
Kalau ada translation pigi bahasa Kadazan, siokkan?
Ya bah kan... Sanang karaja..
ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! That is exactly right @verasj . No one can truly trust the Google Translate my dear.
Just so you know. I do know Mandarin, but horribly rusty. Most of the time I try to skip Google Translate but it is a good tool to refer to some of the old vocabulary just for verification....
But one must not trust first translation of Google Translate.
This happened to me when I was trying to translate Spanish and French when I so happened to have foreign writers commenting on my posts here.
You got to translate and re-translate in order to make sure the vocabularies are correct.
I think so far some people said Apple iTranslate seems to work much better than Google Translate; and I suppose that our unique Bahasa Malaysia is still hard to catch when our grammar is very different from "the standard arragements"
(surprisingly Cantonese is rather accurate)
Thanks for the mention. This has indeed given me a good laugh today.
upvoted and resteemed
Thanks for reading my post... I happen to see the conversation in the discord... Its kinda funny...everyone trying to type in different language. You so lucky to have the advantage to read and write mandarin. My chinese friends only taught me the dirty words...hahahah
lol... omg... I think all the first thing we learn (usually from friends) on other languages we do not understand are usually either curses or dirty words lol....
When I first wrote in Steemit I had re-venture into rediscovering Mandarin, and to be honest, if we were to learn Mandarin in that manner I think we all would have liked it more than mere memorisation.
Chinese Discovery Time: #1 The root word “Human” 人
It wasn't really a hit here in Steemit when I was hardly noticeable by anyone, but it was fun lol...
Hope you find my findings more useful and meaningful than the words you learned from your friends.
Maybe I might take another go and venture into this series again. haha.
LOL... true. Good luck on your next venture..
Hahaha! Google Translate does help a lot as a tool of conversation. This represent that #teammalaysia communities can support International also. 😆
Ya true...it does help me a lot .. but must be careful with the translation, sometime misleading...hahaha
Oh, please don't trust Google Translate... it might get you into trouble with bad translation... hahaha
Thanks for the mention @verasj!
Ya..true...@jeolai... My japanese friend translate 'river bank' to 'Bank sungai'. Hahaha
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