Recently, organizers of two separate events/campaigns — Speak Mandarin Campaign and National Day Parade 2017 — made language gaffes in their publicity materials, and both apologized yesterday for their errors.
On Monday, at the launch of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, a wrong Chinese character was used on a rostrum sign (oh, the irony). Instead of the Chinese character for “read”, the character for “to show disrespect” was used — and displayed very prominently. Both characters actually look similar and share the same pronunciation, but of course, they have very different meanings.
Organizers behind the campaign apologized for the “erroneous rendering of the character” on Facebook and declared they would “take steps to address this”.
On the NDP side, a mistranslation of Tamil was spotted on publicity pamphlets that were distributed to Primary 5 students across 162 schools — these were given out before the NDP’s National Education (NE) shows. The Tamil translation of the theme, #OneNationTogether, had wrongly placed and missing letters, causing what was supposed to read as “let’s come together as one nation” to turn out unintelligible.
Following the mistake, the NDP 2017 executive committee released a statement to apologize to the public. It also said that souvenir booklets with accurate translations were given out during the NE shows on July 2 and July 8.
Colonel Ong Yoke Lam Melvin, chairman of the executive committee, told The Straits Times that “such typographical errors are avoidable and should not have happened. We apologise to all Singaporeans for our oversight, in particular to our Tamil community, for the unhappiness this error has caused.”
