DEC 4 — I try to ignore the Malay subtitles when I watch English movies in cinemas.
The translations are bad. Did I say “bad”? Calling a spade a spade, they are actually much worse.
For instance when a policeman shouts “Fire!” at his colleague to shoot someone, he certainly doesn’t mean, “Api!”
Or when a woman passes by and someone says, “Hey babe”?
It is definitely not, “Hai, bayi.”
Once, I almost rolled on the floor when they translated, “There’s a bomb! Duck!” to “Ada bom! Itik!”.
It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t just sad.
Bad English has become an epidemic in Malaysia. And with the current education standard, I doubt we can reverse it anytime soon.
The National Education Blueprint released September this year said, “Poor English proficiency among fresh graduates, since 2006, has been consistently ranked as one of the top five issues facing Malaysian employers.”
I think this is a fair assessment on where we are as a nation, vis a vis English language proficiency.
Don’t you?
So, imagine my surprise when Putrajaya announced a report saying our level of English proficiency is the best in the entire Asian region, yes, Singapore included.
I thought it was just a bad joke, but in a study carried out by Swiss based EF Education First, Malaysia was ranked first, scoring a few decimal points higher than the Republic of Singapore. We were even labelled as a country with “High English Proficiency.”
The EF Education First website further said, “The index uses a unique set of test data from over two million adults who took free online English tests over a period of three years. Because this group of test takers is so diverse and the entry barrier to taking an online English test is so low, the resulting scores are reasonably representative of the average English level of adults.”
That concludes the inadequate information on their research methodology.
So is it good enough for us to use as a yardstick to measure our English proficiency?
I don’t think so.
A good report should include a breakdown of the subject’s demographic and socio-economic backgrounds, and whether there were inclusion and exclusion criteria involved when selecting them.
But all we got was “free online English test from two million adults.”
That being the case, there is already an urban bias in the subject selection, which skewed the results giving an inaccurate representation of our society.
Let’s face it, there is a real digital divide between Malaysians in an urban and rural setting. An online English test very much excludes the rural students and workers.
What I mean is, can you imagine a student, a housewife, or a farmer from Sepilok turning on his computer, running on an old modem saying, “Hey, let’s try sitting for an English test today.”
You should get your head checked if you can.
Those who took the test were most likely urbanites with basic and intermediate command in the English language.
Policy makers in Putrajaya should not take the result of the study as another feather in their balding cap. This shouldn’t be construed as an achievement of any kind.
Just because the institute is European doesn’t make it trustworthy.
Henry Wheeler Shaw, an American humorist said, “Flattery is cologne, to be smelt, not swallowed.”
We should not rest on our laurels just yet. There is much to be done.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
