A country like Indonesia requires a national lingua franca to connect the countless ethnolinguistic groups that populate its islands. More than 700 languages are spoken indigenously within the borders of the Southeast Asian country, so while most people don’t speak Indonesian as their first language, they do learn it as a second language. In many cases, Indonesians even speak three or more languages, as there are also local lingua francas. One of the many languages spoken in Indonesia is Ambonese Malay.
Ambonese Malay has an estimated 250,000 native speakers and around 1.4 million second-language speakers. Speakers are concentrated on Ambon Island, found in the middle of the Maluku archipelago located between the islands of Sulawesi, Java, and New Guinea. Ambonese Malay has also become a lingua franca on the larger islands of Buru and Seram. Despite Ambonese Malay’s status as a lingua franca, however, Indonesian still dominates the country, putting Ambonese Malay at risk. If you’re looking for Ambonese translation services, they can be hard to find, which is why we at TranslationServices.com have set up our own Ambonese Malay translation team.
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Jumping into the details of Ambonese Malay
Ambonese Malay is a unique language. The region is inhabited by both Christians and Muslims, and typically, the native speakers of Ambonese Malay are Christian. Ambonese Muslims, on the other hand, tend to learn Ambonese Malay as a second language. Both groups may use different vocabulary. Ambonese Malay is a creole language derived from Malay, with heavy influence from Dutch and Portuguese but also borrowing vocabulary and grammar from indigenous languages of the region.
Ambonese pronouns generally come in long and short forms, and they make a clusivity distinction in the first-person plural, indicating whether or not the listener is included. Some of the pronouns carry differing degrees of politeness, with one second-person pronoun classified as “markedly impolite.” As for word order, Ambonese Malay is the same as English, with a subject-object-verb word order. The language features various negation particles that are used in different contexts, including an emphatic negation marker that creates a stronger emphasis on the negation, one that conveys the nuance of “not yet,” one that indicates a contrast (i.e., “not X but Y”), and a negative imperative.
Ambonese Malay is a unique language with many grammatical features that can leave an English speaker desperately confused—but don’t worry, our Ambonese Malay translators are native speakers.
Ambonese Malay translation services designed for you
No matter what kind of translation project you have, we’re confident we can cater to your unique needs. That’s because we’ve built an Ambonese Malay translation team with diverse translators who specialize in different types of translation, both to and from Ambonese Malay. If you want Ambonese-to-English translation for, say, historical documents or traditional folk stories, we’ll help you translate this culturally important information to English, making it more accessible. If you want English-to-Ambonese translation for surveys and questionnaires or content like poems, books, websites, games, or apps, our translators would be pleased to create natural-sounding Ambonese Malay versions of your texts. Such translation helps keep Ambonese Malay strong now and in the future.
Reach out today and tell us all about your Ambonese Malay translation project!