IPOH, Jan 9 — The Perak government reminded its civil servants today not to rely on services such as Google Translate when producing official documents and notices for the public, especially those that may be seen by foreign visitors.
In his latest remarks about an error-ridden notice that was prepared by a council worker using the free translation service, Perak Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Zambry Abd Kadir said the output from Google Translate cannot be assumed to be correct.
“Make sure all translations are checked,” he said in his New Year executive talk for civil servants here today.
The Ipoh City Council (MBI) met with controversy last month after a notice filled largely with faulty English was put up at the entrance of the Perak Tourism Information Centre here, and subsequently went viral.
It was meant to inform the public about the centre’s temporary closure, but ended up drawing attention for all the wrong reasons.
The notice reads: “Sorry for the complementary, we are closing for the temporary, Saturday 30/12/2017 and Sunday, 31/12/2017 because we had an unexpected problem within with our networking and air conditioner issue. We are sure that we are been operated on 2nd Jan 2018.Tq”
Zambry said all of the state’s civil servants should learn from the MBI incident and not allow it to repeat anywhere else in the administration.
