Translate This: Best-sellers or Best-selling

Please look at this picture, at the words ‘LAKU KERAS’. Please try to do a back translation to figure out what the owner of this store is trying to say. This was seen at a leading chain bookstore (no names will be dropped here, dangerous, you know).

Did you manage it? Did you only manage to come up with ‘hard sell’? I don't blame you and I’m telling you, it’s not funny when the intended meaning is actually ‘Best-sellers’.

I scratched my head the whole night the day that my fellow translator posted this in our FB translators group. How they even came to think and suggested ‘keras’ is baffling me. Didn’t they know what ‘keras’ is? Look into any dictionary, nothing else comes up but ‘hard’. This is blatant, irresponsible and shabby translation job. I was lucky to have strong hair follicles, or otherwise my scalp would be exposed and as shiny as the behind of a new Corning heat-tolerant glass pan by now.

I do not think anybody will agree to what it was supposed to mean in the first place.

Even ‘laku’ in this case is very arguable. ‘Laku’ is the ‘Bahasa Basahan’ (informal) of ‘Laris’. 'Laris' is the more appropriate word, but when back-translated into English it means ‘Hot selling’. So, what is ‘best-selling’ then? You have to ask yourself this: What is ‘best’ in Malay? We already know what ‘laris’ is.

Unlike English, Malay does not have superlative adjective in the form English does as in good, gooder, goodest or bad, badder, baddest. (It's a joke, don't kill it, ok). In Malay, for an adjective to be superlatively comparative, it needs to be combined with the word ‘lebih’ to indicate superiority and ‘paling’ to indicate the highest level superiority, which is equivalent to ‘more’ and ‘most’ in English, respectively.

So, after all the above explanation, wasn’t it logical and sensible that ‘best-selling’ or ‘best-sellers’ be translated as ‘paling laris’? Is that so hard for that particular shabby-shoddy-doo guy, who translated it into ‘LAKU KERAS’, to at least ask around? Or maybe he/she did, but I think their darts are played on a chess board instead.

‘Paling Laris’ can even be simplified to ‘Terlaris’. A practice of which is one of the rule of thumb in doing translation: simplification without missing the context. So, in the end:

Best-selling (or Best-sellers) = Terlaris

To think that the institution involved is a bookseller, one who should be part of championing literature, is what makes me angry.

I was angry, then angrier, now angriest!


Here... in smiley form (how ironic! It doesn't even smile but it's still called smiley)