Last week, there were a surge of interest on the dress code of our Ministry of Defense. No, the whole country was not interested in dressing like the military, they actually are more interested in the mangled English that was on the webpage.

It seems that the person responsible of putting up that page uses some sort of machine translation, most probably Google Translate, to translate the entire portion of the page which I presume was originally written in Malay. The result was less then perfect. In fact it’s humorous.

Malaysian being Malaysian are quick to ridiculed other Malaysian. Any chance they got. Countless of screenshots were taken and shared on social networks so that even when the said webpage was taken down, Malaysian can still ridiculed. It’s our favorite pastime.

This post however is not about ridiculing the Minister of Defense’s English blunder, nor is this a post defending them. The whole event that had happen had made me think about languages.

The Internet offers us a borderless world, yet language is still the oldest barrier for the human race. We already have the technology to see, and talk to a person halfway across the globe, yet the technology is useless if both people can not understand each other.

I would have thought that in these modern age we are living in, we somehow have solved this oldest problem for the human race. I would have guess that there are technologies that enables a near perfect one on one language translation. I could be writing or speaking something in one language and a person could read or listen to what I’m saying in another language which they understand. Maybe if we all could understand each other, here’ll be less conflict in the world.

I understand that this is not an easy task. The richness of the world’s language is difficult to comprehend. In fact current computers are also having trouble with basic semantic in languages. Than again, I believe that sending a man to the moon, was not an easy task, yet somehow we manage to.

So kudos to Google and others for trying to solve this problem. In fact maybe we should applaud Mindef for being an early adopter and uses this unproven tech for real, than again, maybe not.

No doubt that this sort of technology won’t come anytime soon, because like others, I’m still waiting for my flying car.