Adventures in Indonesian translation pt 1

What I perceived as a very poor translation on Facebook has lead me to start submitting translations for Google again (it's interface is more userfriendly than facebook's. Also, it lets me do Indonesian to English, which they might need more than english to indonesian. But I like to do both) and I've been submitting translations for English from Indonesian.

For those that don't know, the way this works is I am given a phrase or sentence (with no context) and then asked to give a translation. Not having context can make it pretty hard, and man do I get some funny things. What follows is some funny ones I've got, or ones that provide good translation notes.

• "Hidup bebas di dalam air laut dan tawar."
• I can't tell if this is some sort of saying or word of wisdom or if it is information about a fish. Is it an advertisement offering a way to free yourself from the perils of water? I eventually decided it was probably about a fish.
• "Berita tertangkapnya tuyul tersebut membuat banyak orang penasaran."
• Tuyul, a small spirit of the familiar sort. Where does Google get these to translate? Tuyul can't even be translated into english without a translator's footnote, imo. Penasaran is an interesting word too. Here (and most other places) it is being used like an adjective, even though the wordform itself is a noun. I translated as curious (since that's how I almost always see it being used, and makes sense in this case), but my dictionary says that it literally means "angered" or "anxious to find out something". I guess the second one could mean curious, but why not just say that? Tertangkapnya is also an interesting word being a nominalization. I have an article about -nya nominalizations somewhere, I should probably read it again sometime.
• "Einstein dengan teori relativitas khusus dan umumnya."
• This, as far as I can tell, is a fragment in English and Indonesian. It's easy to translate (you probably don't need to know indonesian to translate it), but it NEEDS MORE CONTEXT
• "Begitu mereka terjerumus, adalah masalah besar di kemudian hari."
• Terjerumus appears to be a new word for me. I think in this case it is definitely being used like "to fall into sin". Also, this appears to be a case where "adalah" means"ada-lah" not "is".
• "Saya membeli kertas, pena, dan tinta."
• This is the one where I realized I was translating most things into the past tense. Probably accurate, but context is really important for translations and even more so for Indonesian, where tense is so context based.
• "Bonus dihitung dan diberikan secara harian."
•  I realized I've been doing a similar sort of thing with things that could be singular or plural. I think in this case it is plural. Honestly, I've gotten pretty bad at marking plurals in english sometimes, it just doesn't seem important anymore.
• "Saya raba seluruh bagian tubuh yang sensitif"
• This is the second translation that I think it pulled from a porn site. I'm translating these as unerotically as possible. "I groped all the sensitive body parts".
• "Apa sih penyebab tubuh kita bisa merasakan gatal?"
• I don't get many translations that use particles like "sih". Kind of hard to translate, but not too bad overall, though I did a pretty liberal translation on this one.
• "Cara menghilangkan jerawat yang aman adalah secara tradisional."
• I'm looking at this one and seeing reasonable translations. First I thought it would be "a safe and traditional way to remove acne", but then I noticed the adalah. The best translation would probably be "A safe way to remove acne is traditionally" and play on the fact that English does allow (I think) adverbs in the predicate like that.
• "Tak pernah secuilpun kudengar kabar tentang dirinya."
• Who even uses language like this? I guess I should try to preserve the formality of it. Trying to decide if I change the word order or preserve it for poetic sake.
• "Kamu wonderwoman, yang membuatku ngerasa jadi superman"
• I don't want the context on this one. Hopefully it's a song or a poem.

Other random translation note. -nya and dia are really difficult because I never know if to translate them to he or she, or if a straight singular they is best. I NEED CONTEXT TO TRANSLATE. Google's advice? "If you feel you need more context (like gender or formality), go ahead and translate as best you can". This is why Google Translate (and all machine translations) suck. Machines can't understand the context and pragmatics of a statement.

Well that's enough for tonight. Translation is a really fun exercise.