Despite efforts being made by the government to protect Arabic language from distortions, the mistakes committed by institutions and supermarkets are still rampant. The Cabinet last year had approved a draft law on the protection of Arabic language.
Supermarkets and institutions commit big mistakes during promotional campaigns when they translate words from English to Arabic.
“I didn’t expect to find such mistakes during my routine visit to one of supermarket. The word ‘local beef head’ was translated into Arabic as ‘president of local beef’. I usually find many mistakes but this mistake made me laugh and also others who noticed it,” said Numaan, a visitor.
Such mistakes mean that the supermarkets have no qualified translators and they let the workers do the translation job without any monitoring mechanism. They do not care about the reputation of the supermarket because such blunders are hot in circulation on the social media and many people take them as laughing stock.
Many other funny translation mistakes were “school drop off” was translated into Arabic like this “school has become sleepy”. Also one of bodies write a “workers working” at work site, and in Arabic they wrote this meaning “workers under fire”, and sure they are not intended to make such mistakes but they also must check before to fix such mistakes in the street.
The draft law approved by the cabinet provides among its provisions that ministries, official institutions, public educational institutions in all levels of education, and municipalities are committed to use the Arabic language and even national public universities and institutions of higher education, overseen by the government, are also committed to teach the Arabic language in all science and knowledge, QNA had reported.
Even the ones who must protect it like governmental institutions and ministries also commit grammatical mistakes and use dialects specially during their publicity campaigns.
“I don’t like to mention the name of any institution but the mistakes are very obvious on streets and everyone can see them,” said Hashem Ameen, an Arabic teacher.
He also added “We can take example of one of the neighbouring counties, it has an institution to check any Arabic words will be post in boards in street, they have to check about all these words if it correct or no, and they are not allowed any to write as he want”.
“Governmental bodies and supermarkets must employee proof readers to check the words if it is correct or not especially the words which are used in road publicity campaigns because such mistakes even children can’t commit.”
