Language is a means of communication. It plays a very important role in human lives. People use it to build up a communication, relationship, and understand each other. It hopes that by using a language, each speaker can transfer and convey the messages delivered, and be understood by receiver well. However, if each of the speaker has different interpretation towards the meaning of the language, especially in translating the foreign language spoken, it will cause a misunderstanding of course. The speakers do not meet the meaning of the words being talked.
Talking about misunderstanding, I have a little funny experience when I was having a conversation with my friend from Bandung a few days ago. He is so eager to learn about English. Therefore he often asks me to say something in English while we are having a chat. At that time I gave him a sentence to be translated into Bahasa.
"The teacher rode me home just now since there was a little accident in class". I sent the sentence through line chat.
We discussed the sentence by phone since we live in different town. He began to tell me the meaning. But I couldn't stand to laugh aloud before he finished it. I laughed over and over. He got confused and asked about my reaction. I just said, "repeat please (tolong ulangi)". He repeated his own translation. Again, I laughed at him aloud. I laughed many times until he asked me to stop and give the explanation.
He translated the sentence like this: Guru tersebut menunggangi saya di rumah hanya sekarang sejak ada sedikit kecelakaan di kelas. How can I not laugh at him? It's totally wrong. The correct meaning should: Guru tersebut mengantar saya pulang tadi karena ada sedikit kecelakaan di kelas.
Then I explained to him that in English, sometimes we cannot interpret the meaning of a sentence only based on the meaning of each word. English has some meaning for each word. So, we have to see the correlation among the words in the sentence. See the context. Ride means menunggang (for horse) and mengendarai (for two wheel vehicles). In the sentence, ride means that the teacher uses his/her motorcycle to take the object home. I explained each word and the function. After he understood, he laughed and said that he embarrassed. However he said that he will not surrender.
Well, don't stop to learn although you often find it difficult to understand it. Be sure that someday your hard work will result something that you cannot imagine. Pump your spirit up.
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Bandar Lampung, 15 Februari 2017
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