Hi. I'm Nick Bekker. My wife, Trish, and I are missionaries working in Lampang, North Thailand. This blog was intended to be my musings and questions about life and my personal observations of Thai life and culture. At present, however, it consists mainly of our monthly newsletters.
I work for OMF, a missionary organisation started by James Hudson Taylor in 1865. First called the"China Inland Mission" (CIM), and focused on China, OMF started working in Thailand in the early 1950's after the Communist takeover in China forced all foreign missionaries out of the country. For more info about OMF's history click here.
Our first year in Thailand was spent learning Thai full-time. At the beginning of 2004, we moved to Chiang Mai in the north to help with a new church plant. In June 2006, I was appointed as the Regional Leader of the North Thailand region.
We went "home" to South Africa for 7 months in August 2007 and returned "home" to Thailand in April 2008. We have recently moved to the town of Lampang in north Thailand.
Having spent a number of years in Thailand, learning the culture and grappling with the language, I really empathise with people who have to communicate in a language other than their own. I am deeply grateful for my Thai friends who patiently smiled and nodded, and gently corrected me, as I massacred their language over the years. There were a number of embarrassing moments when I said things that came out wrong, or that just didn’t make any sense at all. These were all very frustrating at the time, but one thing that helped me to keep things in perspective, and to see the funny side of language study, was when I came across some equally horrendous English translations.
I once got involved in an online debate about the effectiveness of Google Translate. I argued that it was only of value if one was able to speak a moderate amount of Thai or English and that it could never be used to converse with people in Thai if you were English, or in English if you were Thai. The reason is that it provides a direct translation of a sentence word for word and is not (yet) capable of translating an entire concept captured in a sentence. This is patently clear from the examples below of menus that were clearly translated using something like Google Translate - broken up into its component parts, each of these translations are correct, but as you will see, the overall result is less than satisfactory.
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