A religious controversy came and went here in Sarawak before I even heard about it. The Bup Kudus, the translation of the Holy Bible into the Iban language, was banned two weeks ago, and dis-banned today. The Sarawak Tribune I picked up was so information-poor, I could not discern from the article why they banned […]
Tag Archives: translation
Cooties
Girls have cooties. Every young boy can tell you this. Girls may claim that it is in fact boys who have cooties, but that is preposterous. I spent much of second, third and fourth grade avoiding cooties. I also had a number of hand-made cootie catchers, but for some reason, they did not catch or […]
Malay Contributions to English, pt. 3
Recently, the Congress of the United States of America preserved the pride and culture of our great land by passing a resolution renaming French Fries “Freedom Fries”. Yes, they did. This of course was due to France’s unwillingness to support the war on Iraq. But members of the Coalition of the Unwilling are still at […]
Malay Contributions to English, pt 2
With the war in mind, here is the next installment: Amok, usually seen as “run amok”. It tends to be used in English to mean out of control, but the dictionary meaning is the same in English as it is in Malay: In a frenzy to kill; in a violent rage; bloodlust; berserk Let’s use […]
Paleface
In Indonesia, I’m told, bule is a common nickname for foreigners. That’s not really in use over here that I can tell (maybe it is, just not to my face). What I get called most often is orang putih, white man. It’s not the least bit derogatory, and I don’t mind being referred to that way. I never […]
Old Sister Bird
The Malaysian language, Bahasa Malaysia, has contributed a small but interesting number of words to English. I’d like to start an occasional series on them, starting with the Cockatoo. Now, many of you may first think of an irritating pop band, but that’d be the Cocteau Twins. The Cockatoo is a parrot-like bird found here […]
Malaysian Nasheed
[UPDATE: I have gone on to translate a fair number of Malaysian nasheeds and pop tunes. You can browse them with the nasheed and nasyid tags, check out the language category, or do a site search for things like lyrics.] I just can’t keep up with the number of new music groups singing nasheed here in […]
Islamic Books Online
Hizmet Books has lots of islamic books available for free, some in simple html and some in PDF. The english collection is not great, only about a dozen texts, but they are based in Turkey and have books translated into Bosnian, Albanian, Russian, Uzbek, even Polish! What looked like the best book there in English […]