Recently, there was an article about an Engineer who could not get a job, although with First Class Honors. The reason was because he was not proficient in English. There were alot of mix reactions towards it, some saying the employee was discriminating against Malaysians who are proficient in Malay but no other languages, while there were some supportive of the employer that they could be dealing with foreign companies which make English a crucial part of the job.
This incident reminded me of a day-to-day situation which quite a number of us encountered, or to be specifically, the "Banana" Chinese of Malaysia. To those affected, how many times have you walked into a kopitiam, or food court, and the majority of the stalls there display the food they are selling all in Chinese? Yeah, some of us can relate to this, it is quite frustrating, like, they could actually have Chinese and Malay/English displays of the food name, right? Why must they always be only in Chinese? This is going to be a short light-hearted look into this situation.
I asked quite a few of them, why do they only display their food name in Chinese. Some of the answers:
1) They have been doing this for as long as they can remember, so do not see the point in changing.
2) Limitation of display spaces at their stalls.
3) They sell non-halal food, so do not see the point of putting in anything other than Chinese.
Whatever reasons there might be, we certainly cannot force these owners to change it because of us being non-Chinese educated. We can ask our friends who are Chinese educated to translate for us, this is what I always do, I asked my mother to translate for me, which she will always jokingly say "Boh Loh Yong", which translates to "Useless". Then I will reply back why last time you didn't put me in Chinese school :) We always joke about this, but then she does appreciate my command of English and Malay.
Lately, I begin to use the app Google Translate do do this deed for me. I am actually late in using this app to ease my manoeuvre in searching for some of my favourite foods. As you can see from the photo, you just need to open your Google Translate App, then set the Language from Chinese To English. Open the Camera function and point it at the display, it will automatically translate it. It does not reflect truly exactly what they are selling, but it will give you more than enough information to choose what you want to eat. So, lately, I have been enjoying my food with much ease of mind, without worrying what to order, Hope this simple trick helps. Never too late for uncles and aunties to adopt some technologies to help.
Thank you for reading from an Uncle.
Adam Cares is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact Newswav.
