With a large network of in-country, professional Malay translators, Verbatim Solutions can respond quickly and effectively to your Malay language translation needs.
Verbatim Solutions provides professional, high quality Malay to English translations and English to Malay translations. Our Malay translation services will help you maximize your global strategy.
Native Speaking Malay Translators
Verbatim Solutions Malay translation teams are professional linguists performing translation from English to Malay and Malay to English for a variety of documents in various industries including:
Aerospace
Automotive
Defense
Desk-top publishing
E-Learning
Energy & power
Finance
Gaming & gambling
Government
Legal
Medical
Multimedia
Packaging
Rich media
Software
Technical
Tourism
Telecommunications
The Malay language, also known locally as Bahasa Melayu, is an Austronesian language spoken by the Malay people who are native to the Malay peninsula, southern Thailand, Singapore and parts of Sumatra. It is the official language of Malaysia and Brunei, and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is also used as a working language in East Timor.
The official standard for Malay, as agreed upon by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, is Bahasa Riau, the language of the Riau Archipelago, long considered the birthplace of the Malay language.
In Malaysia, it is known as Bahasa Malaysia or Malaysian language, even though it is, in fact, Malay. Similarly, Indonesia adopted a form of Malay as its official language upon independence, naming it Bahasa Indonesia. In Singapore and Brunei it is known simply as Malay or Bahasa Melayu. The reason for adopting these terms is political rather than a reflection of linguistic distinctiveness, as Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia are in fact versions of the same language. An exception would be the dialect spoken in the Malaysian state of Kelantan, which has very difficult intelligibility with other forms of Malay. Javanese Malay tends to have a lot of words unique to it which will be unfamiliar to other speakers of Malay. The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Dialect of Hokkien, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Melaka. The use of this interesting language is dying out however, with the Peranakan now choosing to speak Hokkien or English.
Malay is an agglutinative language, meaning that the meaning of the word can be changed by adding the necessary prefixes or suffixes. Generally the root word tends to be a verb with quantitative prefixes added to nouns which are root words.
The differences between the two are comparable to the differences between British English and American English. Both are mutually intelligible, but with differences in spelling and vocabulary. Bahasa Indonesia differs from Bahasa Malaysia in having words of Javanese and Dutch origin. For example, the word for ‘post office’ in Bahasa Malaysia is “pejabat pos”, whereas in Bahasa Indonesia it is “kantor pos”, from the Dutch word for office, kantoor. In colonial times, the sound ‘u’ (as in ‘moon’) was represented in Bahasa Indonesia as ‘oe’, as in Dutch. In many proper names, the old ‘Dutch’ spelling was retained after the official spelling of this sound was changed to ‘u’ during the Japanese occupation (hence the spelling of the name of the first President, Sukarno as Soekarno). Similarly, until 1972, the sound ‘ch’ was represented in Bahasa Malaysia as ‘ch’, whereas in Indonesian, it continued to follow Dutch and used ‘tj’. Hence the word for ‘brand’ or ‘stamp’ used to be written as chap in Bahasa Malaysia and tjap in Bahasa Indonesia, until a unified spelling system was introduced in 1972 (known in Indonesia as Ejaan Yang Disempurnakan or the ‘Perfected Spelling’) which removed most differences between the two varieties: Malaysian ‘ch’ and Indonesian ‘tj’ became ‘c’, Indonesian abandoned the spelling ‘dj’ (for the consonant at the beginning of the word ‘John’) to conform to the ‘j’ already in use in Malaysia. The old Indonesian ‘j’ for the semivowel sound at the beginning of the English ‘young’, which also still followed Dutch orthographic conventions, was replaced with ‘y’ as in Malaysia. Likewise, the velar fricative which occurs in many Arabic loanwords, which used to be written ‘ch’ in Indonesian, became ‘kh’ in both countries. Although the representations of speech sounds are now identical in the Indonesian and Malaysian varieties, a number of minor spelling differences remain, usually for historical reasons. For instance, the word for ‘money’ is written as ‘wang’ in Malaysia, but ‘uang’ in Indonesia.
