Paper on-line for comment and discussion

[Anthea Fraser Gupta]

This is a lucid and calm paper that provides a useful outline of the
place of English and Malay in higher education in Malaysia. I like the
way it is located in the political and economic realities.

Two thoughts:

1) The drive for translation was doomed by the absence of perceived
need. In Japan it was (and is) necessary to translate from English to
Japanese because there are highly educated people who need to read
scientific texts at the cutting edge but who do not have the skills in
English to read them in the original. In Malaysia, highly educated
people who need scientific texts of this sort can read them in English.
There are many countries with strong local languages in which scientific
texts at high levels are not routinely translated because the potential
readership can read them in English (e.g. Norway, Finland). The focus
for creation of scientific texts in Malay needs to be on the development
and translation of basic texts reaching schoolchildren and the wider
public (a Malay version of 'New Scientist', for example).

2) The paper would be strengthened by some statistics on the economic
and ethnic characteristics of students at the state and private
universities. In some countries (including neighbouring Singapore) the
state universities attract the cream of students and the private
universities are available for those who do not get in. The reasons for
the prestige of private universities in Malaysia are interestingly and
problematically tangled up with the admissions procedures in the state
universities. Though things have been peaceful since 1969, the
management of ethnicity remains at the heart of Malaysia policy, as it
has to be.

Anthea


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Anthea Fraser Gupta (Dr)
School of English, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT
<www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/afg>
NB: Reply to a.f.gupta at leeds.ac.uk
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