"Akibat yang kubur"

You might be wondering what I've been up to over the past few days. Well, I'm doing an attachment in a law firm, and it's bound to end soon.

This is what happened on one of the days where we had to pull a nighter because we were translating submissions and affidavits.

It so happened that the text we were translating was in English and had to be rendered in Malay for formality's sake. Failure to submit an affidavit in Malay will cost a party in the court - any court in MY, for that matter. Proceedings can be done in English, but formal documents are in Malay, and even the address for the judge is in Malay - "Your Honour" becomes "Yang Arif", and yang arif hakim means "the learned judge". Part of the text contained this phrase :

grave consequences

which would usually be rendered in Malay as (either/or) :

akibat yang serius

akibat yang teruk

Yet, when we were in the midst of translating, and it was already quite late to work, the first thing that came into our minds was this :

akibat yang kubur

Bear in mind that "kubur" means grave(stone).

And you can imagine how we split our sides laughing.


"Wei, you want him to go die ah ?"
"*laughs* *cough* okay, okay, let's do the real work this time."


This, and court trips, and lots of other office work. Perhaps more. But I got a slice of legal life.