SHAH ALAM, 12 Apr: The manifesto which was announced recently has been claimed to contain different translations between the Chinese, English and Malay version.
PKR Secretary General, William Leong, claimed that the difference occur in the offer to change the states of Vernacular Schools to Fully Aided Government Schools.
He said that based on the Chinese version of the BN manifesto, on page 19, one of the offers is to change the status of Tamil vernacular schools (SKJT) to fully aided government schools.
However, in the Malay and English versions, the offer is different, which is to change the status of SJKT to fully aided government schools if the school wished to do so.
He added that the differences between the Chinese, Malay and English language versions also show disagreements of opinions within the BN component parties and highlights that the members lack uniformity in drafting the manifesto.
“It is also seen as a lack of sincerity to tackle multi-stream schools, especially on the issue of lack of in-depth research to understand the problems faced by fully government-aided schools,” he said in a statement.
William said that the meaning of the sentence stated in the Chine language version of the BN manifesto, to “change SJKT status to fully government-aided schools”, directly means that if BN wins in the 13th General Elections (GE-13), SJKTs will automatically change their status to fully government-aided schools.
Rather, the meaning in the Malay and English language versions on the line “change the SJKT status to fully government-aided schools if the school wished to do so” means that if BN wins in the GE-13, the SJKT school board can make an application to change the status of their respective SJKT schools and then face a long period of time to settle the approval process.
In the meantime, he also lambasted the action of the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, in dealing with problems faced by schools of different streams in a fair manner.
According to the Education Act 1996, SJKT (Chinese vernacular schools) are classed as ‘capital grant’ schools that receive full aid, but do not receive capital contributions to pay for the schools’ physical facilities, causing SJKCs to raise money from the community to maintain schools.
In this regard, he urged BN to remove racist thinking and to change SJKT status to full government-aided schools automatically, seeing the recognition of the SJKC status under the Education Act 1996.