YES, I AM BILINGUAL……?

I am involved in a project at work for a Chinese client.

Recently, news came filtering down from the top that the clients had requested for the project presentation to be done in Chinese during their upcoming visit. It is still not known if all other subsequent project documents such as the technical specifications will need to be translated to Chinese; or if all subsequent correspondences would be in Chinese should the project be awarded.

The presentation is normally done by the senior managers in the company. But this time, it would have to be delegated to more junior staff of my level, because the senior people either couldn’t speak Mandarin (for those who are Chinese) or were not of Chinese descent.

All the people identified for the presentation, and any subsequent documentation work to be done in Chinese, are so far PRCs.

I am not so sure how I feel about this so far. Up till this moment, I am the only junior manager heavily involved in this project. The technical specifications in English are all prepared by me. I am a Singaporean Chinese, with a bilingual background, and I have shown on several occasions that I am reasonably fluent in spoken Mandarin at least. I have to ask why top management had not even considered me for these Chinese jobs.

Of course, I have to admit that even though my spoken and written Chinese could be considered of above average levels among Singaporeans, there is still a rather large gap in standards between my PRC colleagues and myself. I am honest enough to acknowledge that I would have huge problems if all the Chinese work had been dumped on me, especially having to research all the technical jargon in Chinese.

What bothers me though, is that top management had simply assumed that Singaporean Chinese like myself are unqualified to undertake this job, without giving us a chance to prove or disprove our Chinese/Mandarin competency. It goes to show the confidence that we Singaporeans have in our own bilingual education. It boggles the mind how society expects us to perform in China then, if we cannot even be expected to do so on our own home-ground.

And then I read about the intention to reduce the mother-tongue weightage in local exams. No comments.

For myself, I am now trying to decide if I should offer to take up part of the preparation work for the upcoming presentation and subsequent documentation. It will be a big challenge, and adding much to my increasing workload. But I think it needs to be done, if only to prove a point.