Nancy is a hard girl for me to deal with.
“Dekati” doesn’t mean “to deal with”, but “to come closer” or “to approach”. According to the sentence source, the Indonesian sentence was translated from a Japanese sentence, not directly from the English one. This is a typical case of “lost in translation”.
ナンシーは私には付き合いにくい女の子だ。
I don’t know if you have seen the original Japanese sentence, so I thought I would paste it here to see if you agree with the original translation.
ナンシーは私には付き合いにくい女の子だ。
@sjfree
Thank you for your reply! I think “sulit untuk aku dekati” could mean “Nancy is so gorgeous and I am such a shy person that it’s difficult for me to approach her”, for example. The root word “dekat” means “near” and “mendekati” is “to come closer/approach”.
The English and the Japanese sentences mean that I can actually approach her, but I just don’t like her attitudes and/or opinions, or it’s hard for me to “tame” her.
I think “bergaul” is much better in the context of “to deal with” than “dekati”. “Gaul” is “to socialize”, “to mingle” or “to deal with”. But I need to seek second opinions from Indonesian native speakers.
By the way, I found more frequent errors on Tatoeba between Indonesian-Japanese than Indonesian-English. In most of the cases, the translation authors self-claim that their Japanese skills are lower than English ones. And I guess they just translated sentences from Japanese to Indonesian without checking the counterpart English ones.
So, my first thought agreed with your interpretation of the Indonesian, that Nancy is hard to approach because she is intimidating, beautiful or something of that sort.
Where as the Japanese and the English translations are more negative about Nancy, as in she is hard to deal with being a bit of a pain…