Written English can bring on the woes.

THE thing about English is that when you are good at it, it really galls you to come across bad English, especially in public places.

I was at the Immigration Department at Pusat Bandar Damansara, Kuala Lumpur, to renew my passport using the passport renewal kiosk and among the sentences I read on the screen were:

> Please make sure documents below has been prepared

> Your application will not be process if: passport incomplete, passport scribbled, pages(s) thorn or missing.

The mistakes made me flinch. Don’t these people check the English used in such machines?

I was in for a bigger shock when I visited the “Komodo” Fauna Museum located at the Mini Indonesia Park in Jakarta, Indonesia.

This is an international tourist site and yet the English on signboards for a display case of stuffed animals was atrocious. Here’s a description of a Sumatran mountain goat:

“Scapegoat Sumatra: Mountain goat Sumatra not that demote goat mountains as we country, but as bullock family fauna and cow, wild alive, and now very scarce, found at mountain range ridges Sumatra and at Malaysian.”

Did you understand any of it?

Next, a description of marsupials in which the translator obviously gave up half way and lapsed into Bahasa Indonesia: “This mamals group is alive at Australian area and Irian to West until Moluccas and Celebes. In female stomach poke, usually hollow in front of where is baby very little enter after gived. In Indonesia, found more than 40 kinds divided in far tribes that is: mouse berkantung 10 kinds, bardikut berkantung 7 kind, kangroo, 9 kinds and kus-kus 9 kinds. From family kus found squirrel berkantung that has membrane files to fly.”

The stomach “poke” was actually the “pouch” and the “baby very little” was “the newborn baby”. As for the words “after gived”, I can only surmise that they meant “after the babies had been born”.

I really don’t know what “files” these animals use to fly with but I suspect they referred to “webbed feet”.

As for a description of frogs and reptiles, it went: “Frog at two natures yaitu darat and water, breathe with lung or skin, insect the food, tender age is called the plant the food tadpole and leaf decays. More than 350 frog kinds in Indonesia from little until big.”

I taught Biology for years so I know that tadpoles eat plant food and feed on decayed matter while the adult frogs eat insects! Would a child reading the board discern this? I wonder.

Every single board was riddled with such atrocious translations that I felt embarrassed by it all. I don’t mean to discredit our neighbours, but I almost felt like going up to the authorities and offering my help to correct the boards. This is not the way things should be in a beautiful place like the Taman Mini.

What am I to say? Teachers of English often urge their students to mind their grammar, spelling and pronunciation. They also remind students not to translate literally from their mother tongues but to translate the meaning.

I don’t want to laugh at anyone and if you read enough books or travel enough, you will discover that every tribe, race and nationality has its own way of using and speaking English.

I remember a Filipino maid who asked me one day where the face “tha-wil” was. It took me a long time to understand that she was asking for a face “towel”.

Similarly, Thai people might well drop the sound of “ch”, “l” and “c” in words like “school” and “nice” but once you get used to their way of speaking, you forgive them and just move on.

In Kerala, India, I was once amused by the English spoken by the Malayalee cab driver who drove me to Cochin airport from Ottapalam. I spent one and a half hours listening to him, and was thrilled to hear him out when he gave me a review of Rajni Ganth’s movie, Robot or Enthiran.

The reason? It was the emphasis he paid on the end syllable of every word!

“Very nice” sounded like “very niccerr” and words like “certainly” sounded like “cerrrrtainlyy”.

It was too much for me. At the airport, I offered to buy him a cup of tea and he agreed, “You buyyy?” he asked incredulously.

I nodded my head. That cup of tea earned me the compliment that I was “a verrry kinderrr and goodduh laddy”.

I remember another story my husband told me. A British manager had been handed a wedding invitation card by his Malaysian clerk. When he enquired as to whether he was expected to attend the wedding, she said to him, “You want to come also can, you don’t want to come, also can!”

Puzzled, he was left scratching his head.

V.S. Naipaul in his book Miguel’s Street captures the way people in Trinidad speak English. A man was described doing his work, “regular, regular” and a woman liked to keep her house, “clean, clean”. Instead of “us”, the Caribbeans seem to prefer saying “we” in expressions like “he don’t like we”.

Malaysians too like to use words twice such as, “Please drive slowly, slowly” and “Morning, morning, I like to take a walk”. Obviously, these are expressions literally translated from Malay: “perlahan perlahan” and “pagi pagi lagi”.

When you translate literally, you often cause others who know English to laugh, like the Sabahan teacher who told a male and female teacher who were quarrelling to “make love” very innocently. He didn’t realise that “make love” is also something husbands and wives do in the bedroom!

Another translated the expression, “buat buat sayang” (pretend to like) also to “make, make love”, causing hilarity among those within earshot.

When informed why we had laughed, he said, “I no like this English. I ‘hard hard’ learn but still I no well in English.”

All said and done, given our respective cultural nuances, I think the English you speak is still forgivable but it’s terrible when your mistakes are in the written form and placed where everyone can read them.

• Survey: Britons love tea more than coffee
• New York City relies on automation technologies to face challenges of urbanisation
• Oil palm firms team up with Sabah to protect Malua Forest Reserve
• Powering the Big Apple
• Build robust cities
• Fun with words
• Rail marvel in New York
• Fun with synonyms
• Carnegie Hall gets green facelift
• Win The Good Food Cook Book!

Latest Jobs from Star-Jobs