Living in a glass house
I wish Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Nor, quite frankly, can Ma really pass himself off with native fluency in written English. After all, this was a man who boasts in his Taipei City government Web site biography of his experience as a lawyer in the US, working for "Wall Street law firms." However, the reader should note at this point that Ma is not said to have passed a bar exam in New York (or any other US state for that matter), nor is he described as a member of any bar association in the US. As a lawyer myself, I know that if you are not qualified as a lawyer through passing a bar exam, it's pretty pointless to talk about which firm you worked for.
But before the pan-blues construe this as personal attack on Ma, I just want to remind Ma (and the blues), that he who lives in a glass house ought not to throw stones. By that, I mean that if Ma wants to criticize the education ministry for its English skills, he ought to make sure that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has an impeccable command of English. A quick trip to the KMT Web site, however, shows otherwise.
Let's just count the mistakes on the KMT's English-language Web site. The first thing I noticed on the site was the following paragraph:
Instead of trying to make amends, the DPP recently coined campaign slogans ("he R.O.C. does not exist", or "pushing for a new Taiwanese Constitution".
I guess the KMT and Ma meant to use "the" instead of "he," and generally in English (or Chinese for that matter), an open parenthesis has to end with a closed one. That's two simple mistakes. Next:
Whie will rebuild the morale of civil servants and return to them their self-respect, which was trampled on by the DPP.
I have no idea what a "Whie" is. Is that some new KMT moniker? How about this:
Overcoming the vilification of the KMT by DPP Public Relations (campaign). indispensable tool in democratic politics.
Seems to me there is an incomplete sentence here.
However, we should not con- fuse the will of the people with meaningless calls for reform and political expediency.
I don't know about you, but I am confused by their "con-fused." Did a convict ("con" is the slang for convict) fuse the will of the people?
Those are just five mistakes I found on a couple of Web pages run by the KMT, and these are apparently final work products. My point isn't to harp on the KMT's poor English, but merely to point out that mistakes happen whenever someone puts a pen to paper. Typos, bad grammar, etc are an inseparable part of writing.
There are probably loads of errors in my letter. [Editor's note: There were, indeed, numerous spelling and grammatical errors in this letter. Hopefully most of these have been corrected in the editing process.] But, what's the big deal? Does it mean that I am an uneducated fool? Not really. Unlike Ma, I hold an engineering degree from West Point and a real law degree from Stanford, ie, a Juris Doctor as opposed to Ma's SJD (or JSD, whatever they call it these days).
So the educational ministry had a couple of errors on a draft of their treaty with Palau? Does that mean Taiwan is about to fall into an educational abyss? Not likely, Ma. If we apply this logic, then the KMT -- considering the errors on its Web site -- isn't fit to govern or deal with foreign dignitaries. So relax, Ma, and stop worrying about other people's English skills.
Instead, start worrying about your -- and your party's -- own.
Ryan Shih
New York
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