Thursday, December 1, 2016

Statistics Bill 2016 – III


Today one of my friends told me that she had recently read an article in the newspaper that said that the term တရားဝင်စာရင်းအင်း in the Statistics Bill indeed stands for "official statistics". If so, how would we say "non-official statistics" in Myanmar language? Clearly တရားမဝင်စာရင်းအင်း would be unacceptable.

That was obvious at once from the title of the document by the Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities we cited in our post "Statistics Bill 2016 - I", namely, "Development of guidelines/best practices on the use of non‐official data" (my emphasis here).

This reminds me of a parallel situation in the education area. They have "formal education" and "non-formal education". Using the same English-Myanmar dictionary by Myanmar Language Commission that I have mentioned before and looking up for the word "formal", we find:

Here we see that the Myanmar word "တရားဝင်" appears again now for the English word "formal". Last time the same Myanmar word was used for "official". Happily people in education called formal education "ကျောင်းသင် ပညာရေး" so that non-formal education (not informal education) effortlessly becomes "ကျောင်းပြင်ပ ပညာရေး

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