A Happy Song (alt: A Song of Hope and Joy)

 Just to prove that I'm not just sadposting and still have some linguistics content, here's a project I've been working on. And by working on, I mean put together in a couple hours this evening, instead of leaving it for next week like I originally planned to. 

So once I finish "Fishing for Birds" my next project is an EP called "Scandals from the Karaoke Booth" which is a bunch of covers. I did the first one/the opener a long time ago, a cover of Sparklehorse's "Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man." Which tells you a lot about what this project is like. Most people cover just Happy Man because it's a rocking song. But while it can be played alone, thematically it works best in conjunction with Chaos of the Galaxy. I took this a step further by focusing almost entirely on Chaos of the Galaxy with just hints of Happy Man, making it a cover but very much my own interpretation of it. 

That's not the point though. The next song I've been working on is "Lagu Bahagia" by Sisir Tanah. Now, I can sing this just fine in Indonesian but that doesn't fit the spirit of the album. So I decided to do my own translation of it. This blogpost is about the theory behind that (and will probably make it to reddit at some point). 

 

Intesification in Indonesian?

Random question of the day. Has anyone done a study/published a paper on the indonesian infix -w- (alternatively -u-). Like in panas vs pwanas and bagus vs bwagus. I think it comes from javanese, but I can't find any literature about its use in Javanese either.

I heard it all the time, especially in East Java, and occasionally I see it written to, but I can't seem to find anything actually about it. Like it is a feature that everyone seems to know and understand when someone else uses it, but no one officially recognizes it as a real thing.

I'm a just crazy thinking that this is an actual productive infixation? Is my analysis of it being an intensifier wrong? Do people actually understand it whenever it is used, or only in lexicalized words? And most importantly, why has no one studied this? It seems like a surely some Malayacist would have done a paper on it by now. If not, I guess I have a possible research paper to write, if I had time and was actually in a lingustics program.

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.