Translate this: In retrospect

According to dictionary.com, retrospect is:

1. (noun) contemplation of the past, survey of past time, events etc; 

2. (verb w object) to look back in thought, refer back (often followed by to);

3. (verb wo object) to look back upon.

In retrospect, meanwhile, is categorized as an idiom. The meaning: do this: combine all the meanings from all three above, then, rearrange the words as sensibly as you can. In other words, they all carry the same meaning.

With such an extensive description, you might think that the translation is easy peasy, didn’t you? Well, as we found out the other day, given as a challenge by yet again Tuan Syed Nurulakla, we required a brain-cracker, just to come out with a lame 'melihat ke belakang'. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Melihat ke belakang is what we do physically when we turn our head to look at what is behind us. So our genius senior lecturer with UPM (him lah!) simply uttered 'apabila ditinjau kembali'. Which received a very long "ooooooohh! Ya tak ya jugak!"

If you are a Malay speaker, native or not, you know it already, it’s self-explanatory. The thing here this time is picking the correct word(s) from a pool of words that has the same meaning. The essence of the translation is a word that carry the meaning of 'look': pandang, lihat, tengok, tinjau. While the rest are dead-straight meaning ‘look’ physically, it is left to tinjau, which can flexibly mean ‘look back’ to do the trick.

Or did we actually forget the existence of the word tinjau? (excuse, excuse, excuse)

There you go.