Lost in translation? Lost in culture

How can you be an alien in your own hometown? Easy. Stop talking like everybody else. And it's not even the usage of a "foreign"language that will DEFINITELY make you look like a pompous little shit, but just use the "official" unifying language. In my case, it's Bahasa Indonesia.

Of course, being Indonesia, the archipelagic country in Southeast Asia, we are blessed (or cursed) with so many different languages, dialects, cultures and habits. It all depends on where you live. I live in the capital of West Java province, which is mainly influenced by Sundanese culture (NOT Sudanese). Anyways, other than using Bahasa Indonesia, we use Sundanese for daily conversation. It's a beautiful language, with its own craziness. 

I speak a bit of Sundanese, and not even the formal one. So this language has different degrees. The highest and most polite one, the daily relaxed one and the last one which you only use when you're talking to people younger than you. I speak the most crude one because I'm a "Sunda murtad"---as that's how they would label me. I use it with my friends when no politeness is required and conversations/discussions feel funnier when Sundanese is fully applied.

But, as I have been saying lately in my blog or somewhere else, I don't really go out and meet people these days. It means that the time I'm spending socialising and applying languages with other human beings is pretty limited. I am now working on a translation, from English to Bahasa Indonesia, and the Bahasa Indonesia that I'm using is of course the "proper" one; the one that will pass my editor's standard. So, whether I want it or not, the way I speak is heavily influenced by the way I write.

And of course the inevitable happened. When I finally went out of my room-cave last night to the real wild world and met other human beings with their own crazy mind, I sounded like an alien. I realised I sounded weird...probably I  was too self conscious. But anyway, I tried to switch to Sundanese for a bit. And it went okay...for a bit. Because my brain kept on switching back to Indonesian. And I couldn't stop my mouth sprouting words that sounded like they were coming out of a bloody dictionary or a "Belajar Bahasa Indonesia untuk Pemula" book.

And OF COURSE, the guys were starting to tease me. I became even more self conscious, a bit embarrassed too. It felt like I failed in integrating myself to the "local" culture or whatever. But, on the more positive side, because of my weirdness, I got to talk to people about different stuff related to Sundanese culture and history, and getting lots of different information because everyone was trying to impress everybody else by showing off their abilities and knowledge to this little alien, sitting in front of them with a wide silly grin.