Thursday, December 4, 2008

Manglish = Malay + English

I received an email from a friend this morning. In it he provided a link to the Official Website of our National Registration Department. At the top right hand corner of the page is a catchy tagline: JPN ERA BARU. To those who're not familiar with Bahasa Malaysia, that tagline means JPN NEW ERA.

The subject webpage concerns Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ), specifically dealing with the issue of identity cards. Below is a screenshot of the webpage (it will probably be removed or amended very soon):



Click on the picture to get a better view of its contents.

While it is possible—hopefully—to understand what the Department is trying to explain to the public, the standard of English is just awful. Years of neglect and gradual decline of the standard of English in our education system had resulted in such an embarrassing product—in our Government's website.

It's one of the most common reasons why I have to reluctantly reject the job applications of the many graduates from our local universities.

Don't believe those politicians when they appear to defend our education system. If you investigate further, you might be surprised to find that they themselves send their children to foreign universities. That should give you an idea of what they think of our own universities, in spite of what they say.

This is not exactly the kind of "new era" we're hoping for, don't you think so?

7 comments:

Ozzy said...

the English is too bad to be true! i think they used some sort of automatic language translation program. But even so there's still no excuse!

Anna said...

i entered the same address as shown on the page, but the contents are different.. is it possible that the contents has been altered

Cornelius said...

Ozzy,

I don't know about translation softwares, but I'm inclined to believe that this is not a software business we're dealing with here.

Cornelius said...

Yes, Anna, the page is no longer the same as what we saw this morning. But of course we saw that coming, didn't we? That's why I thought it's a good idea to capture it to a screenshot. Obviously they'd change the page when people start commenting (negatively) on it? I said so in my post - that "it will probably be removed or amended very soon"

Anonymous said...

Nah...probably a hacked and doctored version to discredit the webmaster, like Ozzy said, too bad to be true ! Don't believe everything you read.

Cornelius said...

Yeah, I suppose that is also possible. But of course there hasn't been any announcement that the site was hacked - at least none so far.

Too bad to be true, huh? Very interesting way of seeing it!

CK said...

patrick teoh made a post on it. read here. http://niamah.blogspot.com/2008/12/wat-la-our-engrand-sooooo-bad-ah_03.html

i once saw a banner in JPN with ridiculously written eng-rand also
http://atanck.blogspot.com/2008/11/malaysia-boleh-language-i.html

enjoy singapore!