By C C Pung
Justice of Peace
One of those books I bought on a whimp and never got around to reading it.
It’s a book by a German psychologist.
It’s titled ‘Nobody can not lie’. It argues that everybody lies.
We’ve heard of ‘harmless lie’, ‘innocent lie’ to describe the white lies we often found ourselves giving to get out of a jam.
It’s a kind of litmus question not to assess a person’s honesty, but more, I think, a yest of a person’s ability to think on his feet, or in other words a measure of his IQ.
I can see in my head some holier-than-thou characters I know who’d be on their feet, thumbing their chests, declaring that they never lied, and will never lie.
I recently posed a question in a group shoot-the -breeze session asking if anyone consciously remember every traffic rules before backing out of one’s garage each day, while everyone more or less conceded that the rules are generally taken for granted, one clever guy keen to put his PhD mind on display shot up a hand and declared that he consciously is aware of every traffic rules.
The room went quiet … as it should be when a savant speaks.
This book is among a non stop output of works translated from non Chinese publications.
In Taiwan, institutions of higher learning and other language and literary NGOs share a dedication towards enriching the reading materials available to Chinese in Taiwan.
I visited Taiwan bookshops in Taipei decades ago before the advent of Google Translate-like software, even than the latest literary works from the US and Europe were on every shelf.
I have not seen the same kind of literary enthusiasm in Malaysia.
I suppose that with the way our national language is developing and being developed, any translation of works on psychology (such as this one) or science or innovation will be difficult.
Because we’ve not developed the vocabulary necessary for a good translation, the product could be translation filled with Malay-nized words.
Just leaf through our best Malay dictionary and discover how common is the practice of tweaking English word resulting in a pronunciation barely different from its original.
Try psychology, anthropology, oxygen, technology….?
