Recently, while I was translating a Malay copy, I came across a noun, "pintu air". If you translate it literally you'd get "water door".Frankly, I've never heard of the word before. At first I thought the phrase referred to areas somewhere near the rivermouth but it didn't make sense. Why would you call a rivermouth "pintu air" when you already have the word rivermouth to describe what you meant.
Anyway, I asked my Malay colleague about the meaning of pintu air and was told that it had something to do with irrigation. "It's a structure you build across the irrigation canal so that you can slow the flow of water or stop it altogether," he said.
In the end I settled for "water outlet in irrigation system". Alas, the correct word was "sluice" (see picture)
No comments:
Post a Comment