Thinking In English And The Asian Way Of Saying Things

It was another day at work yesterday until my superior came over to my desk in the afternoon and whispered to me to take a look at one of the translations I did earlier in the morning.

"This is very Asian way of saying things," she told me.

The paragraph in question is about a man being struck by lightning at so and so time. I had translated the paragraph literally from the Malay copy without changing the structure of the sentence.

In the original copy, the paragraph was: "Dalam kejadian pada pukul 7 petang itu, Ali, 27, sedang bermain bola bersama rakan-rakan apabila kejadian itu berlaku," -- which itself is already a badly written copy.

So I translated it thus, "In the 7pm incident, Ali, 27, was playing with several friends when the lightning struck."

My superior said the better way of translating the paragraph would be: "Ali, 27, was playing with several friends when the lightning struck at 7pm." I kind of agreeing with her. It does sound better this way.

By the way, in case you want to know the story, the man died in the incident. And according to eye witnesses, the weather was fine at that time. The picture above, taken by yours truly, is for illustration purposes only.