The Family Girl Blogs (aka "The New Working Girl Blogs") Blog #33: A Lesson on Language, or No, My Thing Isn't Broken... To see all of Bobbie's Family Girl Blogs, click on this link: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/28818/family-girl-blogs

Online translators are rarely perfect when they translate sentences from one language to another, but most times they at least approximate what you intended to say.   Sometimes, though, they don't even come close.

Aunt Andrea sent a comment recently and she said, in Filipino, "pumalya inyo."
http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/blog/34843/family-girl-blog-32...

Anyway, I talked to Tintin, my assistant here, and asked what that meant.   She said it meant, "your thing is broken."

Huh?

Hmmm.   Sounds faintly worrisome.   I assumed that wasn't what she was trying to say, so I tried to figure it out, with some interlingual assistance from Tintin.

And my "thing" is working fine, thankyouverymuch...

So.   Here's what I got from "Professor" Tintin...

"Pumalya" is a verb that translates to "miss" or "to be absent," and  "inyo" is a pronoun that translates to "your" or "yours".   But It's our guess when Aunt Andrea used Google, Google thought the word "miss" was akin to the "miss" in "I 'miss' you," but according to Tintin "pumalya" is more like the "miss" in "I 'missed' the target," or like "I will 'miss' the meeting."

Like English, Filipno is a very polysemic language, where one word can have many meanings.   Thing is, the polysemic English pronoun-slash-verb "miss" did not have a one-is-to-one match with the polysemic verb "palya," and its past participle form, "pumalya."

Colloquially, "pumalya" is used in sentences referring to misfiring car engines or things that went wrong.   For example, "my car is not running smoothly," or "my car is misfiring" can translate to "pumapalya ang kotse ko."   "I made a mistake" can translate to "pumalya ako."   Or "your thing did not work" can translate into "pumalya ang inyo."

The thing is, the idea or sentiment behind the sentence, "I miss you" isn't directly translatable since the Filipino language doesn't have a direct equivalent to that sentiment.   The closest would be "I wish you were here" (formally - "ang nais ko ay nandito ka" or informally - "sana nandito ka.").   

Tintin says there are more ways of saying the same thing, but Filipinos nowadays just bridge the translation gap by resorting to what they call "Taglish," which is when they use English words in sentences, conjugating them as if they were Filipino words, especially if the idea they want to convey has no direct equivalent in Filipino, or if they want to convey the exact same idea.   This is no problem for bilingual Filipinos that know both English and Filipino - they do word-substitution instinctively.   In common discussions, in fact, it's very common for Filipinos to mix both languages.

Anyway, the colloquial taglish translation of "I miss you" is "nami-miss kita," or, informally, "miss kita" or "miss ko na ikaw."

So, to respond to Aunt Andrea, "oo, miss ko rin ikaw."

Which translates to "Yes, I miss you, too."

And there's definitely nothing wrong with my thing...

p.s. Hi, Aunt Andrea!   Hope you don't mind my little funny-blog.   You know I love you...
  

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