CHOP! Chop! You need the teacher to chop on the form, then we can register for the course,” cried one student.

“Oi! Salah! Wrong lah. We not say chop but we have to get a stamp from our teacher! Aiyoh! You all ... so bad your English lah!”

“What news?” the Japanese man then greeted the teacher, grinning from ear to ear.

“No, you have to say Apa khabar? This is the Malay way of greeting each other. We cannot translate words directly from the Malay language to English,” explained the teacher to his foreign students in class.

Occasionally, a direct translation of Malay or Chinese to the English language can be disastrous. International travellers have relied on three primary methods of bridging the language gap: taking time to learn the local tongues; utilising a phrasebook; or engaging in a spirited display of improvised face pulling and sign language.

The Americans have invented the Phraselator, a hand-held device that translates 150,000 prerecorded commands and questions into 53 languages, including Russian, Tagalog and Arabic.

A Phraselator sounds as if it is related to the Terminator in the movie and implies that it will speak with a heavy Arnold Schwarzenegger accent. Bless our souls! Researchers state that it will unlikely be able to perceive metaphor, nuances and sarcasm or irony.

One day, I spoke into a Phraselator belonging to my American pal. I said, “Roses are red and violets are blue.”

It replied in a monotonous bur clear voice, “Sugar is weed and sour you.”

Then I spoke Shakespeare’s words into the device, “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks!” This is in classical English language. I added, “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!”

Those words were translated mechanically as “That soft! Watt light three under Brando brakes! It is diseased and Juliet is the sun!”

At least the machine is translating sentences although not accurately. In my English language classes, besides translation, some errors can be enlightening.

“The silly bus is found in our books,” remarked an Arab student.

“No ... the syllabus is in the textbook,” I explained.

“What are you doing, Toida? I asked you to write down 10 sentences,” I asked my Japanese student.

“Oh! I am not understanding what you are saying, so I am drawing these pictures.”

Therefore, misunderstanding occurs not only in language teaching but when learning other subjects as well.

Indeed one can marvel at the oddities or “lunacy” in this language, although English has great prestige.

Malaysians use the word “horn” as a verb but in traditional English, this word is used only as a noun.

“Can lah” and “cannot lah” are favourite terms used by Malaysians and we use the word “spice” differently. We use “spicy” to describe food which is liberally sprinkled with chillies, or other ingredients which make our eyes water.

When we ask someone whether he likes spicy food, an Englishman will usually use the word “hot”. From here we can infer that the word “spice” is not primarily thought of in Britain as meaning “flavoured with chillies”.

When one splashes himself with Western aftershave for men like Old Spice, one does not expect to make one’s eyes water. One expects to smell nice.

The poet Tennyson wrote:

And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad.

And the muck of the rose is blown.

The spice trade in South-East Asia was founded upon the need for sweet-smelling preservatives as for fine-tasting ingredients. Hence kopitiam/coffee shop, karipap/curry puff, donut/doughnut, syiok/great and yam seng/cheers are all languages and dialects intertwined.

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