A passport to bad English

Embarassing English grammatical errors appear to be rife in the latest edition of Malaysian passports.

PETALING JAYA: Hundreds of thousands of Malaysian passports may be riddled with English grammatical errors.

The mistakes can be seen in the last two pages of the latest edition of the passports, where a notice and cautionary note are printed.

These errors found there, which include an incorrect use of English, are as follows:

• “This passport is valid to be used according to its approved validity period. The passport must remain valid for at least 6 months before the date of any journey abroad.”

• “This passport could not be amended and is not transferable to any party other than the holder.”

• “In the event of the lost of the passport, a police report should be lodged immediately and prior to making any deals at the Immigration Department or the Malaysian Embassy, High Commission or Consulate abroad.”

• “A Malaysia citizen who has become or holding any foreign citizenship could be revoked of his/her Malaysian citizenship.”

• “The holder’s passport photograph should be replaced if the holder’s looks and features have visibly changed.”

• “This passport contains sensitive electronics. For best performance, do not bend, perforate or expose to extreme temperatures.”

It is believed that errors occurred due to a direct translation of the Malay texts on both pages to English. Previous passport editions only have the Malay text printed on the last page.

FMT was first alerted to the mistakes through an anonymous passport holder, who recently received his copy from the Shah Alam Immigration branch.

“I usually let bad grammar go, but this is a passport we’re talking about. It’s not just some internal memo or website notice.”

“Malaysians are going to use this document overseas as our identity, and honestly I can’t accept such incompetence,” he told FMT.

Immigration owns up

When contacted, Immigration Department director-general Alias Ahmad admitted that the passports were rife with these errors, and promised to do away with them.

“We take note of this, and in the next issue we will make amendments,” he said.

Citing a lack of statistics, he added that he did not know how many passports had been printed with these errors. FMT understands that the numbers could very well be in the hundreds of thousands.

Alias said that Immigration issued close to 200,000 passports every month, and about 2.2 million copies in total last year.

As such, he said that it would be very expensive to order a recall of the erroneous passports.

Alias was also coy on how Immigration allowed this edition to go through without stringent checks.

“I need to check [how this happened]. Maybe they were printed before I came in [as director-general] one year ago,” he said.

He added that Immigration “engaged” with the National Institute of Translation over this matter.

These errors are not the first time the Malaysian government has been caught with its pants down over poor use of English.

In January this year, a page on the Defence Ministry’s website detailing official dress codes was littered with poorly-translated English text.

This included confusing dress directions such as “bersongkok bersamping dark” and “tight Malay civet berbutang three”.

The page also had this to say about dress codes on particular days:

“Public officials are not in uniform must wear long-sleeve batik shirt with collar/mongoose fight made in Malaysia on every Thursday and also when attending official functions that do not require the use of certain types of clothing.”

The ministry has since removed the English translation.