Official statements in vernacular languages – why not?

If Malaysia allows vernacular languages in the education system and the media, why not official statements from ministries?

Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi, Free Malaysia Today

When Lim Guan Eng issued an official statement in Mandarin, he drew a lot of flak not only from the enemy’s camp, but also from his own PH members as well as some NGOs. I would like to deal with two sub-issues relating to the so-called idea of Malay as the “official” language.

Firstly, I would like to raise the idea of a single “official” language. In principle, I have no problem with the idea of national integration or the special place of Malay as a historical and geographical lingua franca in these regions. The idea is sound.

What I fail to understand is, in a country that allows vernacular languages or mother tongues in primary and secondary education, as well as the legal act of having newspapers in different vernacular languages, why an official statement from a ministry in multiple languages would seem strange.

I once sold a piece of land to a Malay who could not understand a word of English, and he signed the sales and purchase agreement without understanding a word on those papers. Official language? Really? If we were serious about respecting the mother tongues of our people, I would expect certain important statements from all ministries to be in all the different media languages available. That way, there would not be an issue of wrongful translation by the newspaper whose language is other than Malay or English.

I have translated books from English to Malay and I have had first-hand experience as well as headaches trying to figure out the best expressions in Malay to be used. I have read the Quran translations in Malay and English and I know the limitations of these mediums in conveying information from another medium.

I have written many books about architecture in Malay and tried my hardest to explain the philosophical constructs of thoughts and ideas of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright from the US, as well as William Morris and John Ruskin from England. I had difficulty explaining the thoughts of Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier because their original writings were in German and French respectively, and the books I had access to were the translated works in English.

Any academic would tell you that the best translator of a message is the originator of the message. If a ministry wishes to impart a message, it is best to be the translator of the message because if the newspaper translates it itself, misquotes and misunderstanding would be the order of the day.

Now, some ignorant person would say, what is the big deal? Just issue the statements in Malay and English and let the news media translate them. What’s so hard about translating?

Many of us have watched and enjoyed the trilogy “Lord of the Rings” by JRR Tolkien. Few of us have actually read the three books of Tolkien. Fewer still have read the story of how Tolkien wrote “Lord of the Rings”.

I have watched and read them all. Tolkien was an academic who spent his life trying to understand the structure and meanings of languages. To us, languages are just words we type on the computer. One word may equal another. Not so. When Tolkien tried to create his own form of languages as an experiment in communication, he found that words have no meanings if they are not related within a context of historical events, myths, beliefs, cultures and geography.

Tolkien never intended to write “Lord of the Rings” from A to Z but he was trying to experiment with language construction and structure by creating the Elvish tongue, the Dwarf letters and the sinister language of Mordor. In creating symbols of alphabets as well as phonetics of words, he had to create fictitious legends, wars, cultures, beliefs and geographical landscapes. From the intertwining of these fictitious myths, legends and wars came about the loose strings of “Lord of the Rings”.

Without the many fictitious contexts of legends, myths and history, words created would be as meaningless as the computer binary code of zeroes and ones. Language is not about imparting information per se but also nuances of emotions, emphasis and subtle meanings.

I would like next to deal with the issue of Malay as the Bahasa Rasmi (official language) and Bahasa Ilmu (language of knowledge). I would like to paint a picture for the Umno die-hards, showing that even the public universities have almost abandoned these Bahasa Melayu dan Bahasa Ilmu constructs.

When I worked at a public university down south, our departmental meetings were held in Malay and English but minutes were written in Malay. When the university began taking in foreign academics, the discussions and minutes were all in English. So much for Bahasa Rasmi. At the faculty level, discussions and minutes were all in Malay because none of the foreign academics were invited.

Next came the PPSMI issue where Dr Mahathir Mohamad forced the turning of Maths and Science into English. This was done when the Malay electorates rejected Umno en masse because of the Anwar Ibrahim saga. Umno was saved by non-Malays, and I thought that was the reason Mahathir made the U-turn in disregarding Bahasa Melayu as Bahasa Ilmu.

Only UKM objected to this move. Other public universities simply followed blindly with full servitude. I had objected to the university instruction to lecture in English. My objection was based on the fact that my Malaysian students were all taught in Malay at their SPM. Furthermore, I was teaching Architectural History and Philosophy. I would be talking to myself if I lectured in English! I did compromise in lecturing the subject of Structures for Architects as it was full of numbers and calculations. The transition was not so bad.

Then came a time when the public university I worked for began to have illusions of being “international” and “world class”. This required the acceptance of foreign students to increase its ranking. I again objected because we were a public university funded by the Malaysian people – what is the point of spending time and energy to teach foreigners? Are we not betraying the primary responsibility of educating our Malaysian children?

I did not mind very much the intake at the post-graduate level because there were not many local students who applied then. But the lecturer should never make the excuse of not having time to teach undergraduate subjects just because he or she has so many foreign post-graduate students. Again, I resisted the university’s instruction to lecture in English until one semester, I walked in and there was an Iranian boy sitting in my Theory class amid 80 of my local students. I had no choice then but to betray the Bahasa Melayu-Bahasa Ilmu construct.

On another occasion, I had the opportunity to be the external examiner for a masters thesis viva at UiTM. The content of the thesis was passable but the English was full of grammatical errors. I asked the supervisor why the candidate, who was a Malay, had not written the thesis in Malay. He answered, it was the UiTM requirement that all post-graduate theses be written in English!

When my daughter became a lecturer at UiTM, she taught in English. When I asked Dyana Sofia of DAP who studied law at UiTM, she said most of her classes were taught in English. Umno should take heed of this before accusing Lim Guan Eng of being a disloyal Malaysian by issuing translated statements in Mandarin.

My point here is that even public universities in Malaysia, with the exception of UKM and perhaps one or two others, are all in the English mode. Why? They have a simplistic and narrow understanding of “internationalisation” and being “world-class”. According to Professor Sham Sani, being a great university is about being acknowledged by your peers regarding the knowledge that you bring into the world, not the language of communication.

One of the saddest things that happened to me was when I asked several Malay lecturers to write a book with me in Malay, and they all refused because it was not considered “world-class”. They would agree if it were in English. I said, one of the roles of the academia is to educate the rakyat and the masses on issues which we think are important, and this must be done in our mother tongue of Malay. I had to abandon the book project as it was considered “low-class writing”.

In conclusion, I wish to reiterate that I think that official statements in various vernacular forms should be in practice because we, Malaysians, allow the existence of vernacular schools and newspapers.

I wish to also say that translation is not an easy matter and must come from the originator of the message.

Secondly, my wake-up call is to those “Pejuang Bahasa Melayu”: Wake up and smell the stink from public universities. Malay has been made irrelevant by university leaderships who do not understand the value and responsibility of knowledge as a civilising element and its relationship to the language of the mother tongue of Malay. Internationalisation and being the best have nothing whatsoever to do with a second rate command of “Manglish” (Malaysian English). So, to those critics of official statements in other than Malay, take a good look at yourself in the mirror before pronouncing unkind judgments on others.