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proposed that the Finance Committee of this Council should appropriate some $40 million for recruiting expatriate English teachers. If no review is made on the shelving of the decision on the Chinese Language Foundation, it is feared that the public would misunderstand that the Government is giving favoured treatment to
Now that we are preparing one language while maltreating the other.
to have bilingual laws, it is all the more imperative to have this
decision reviewed.
I agree with the view of the Report that the establishment of a Chinese Language Foundation is necessary to promote the wider use of Chinese in society. The establishment of such a Fund could attain four purposes. First, the Chinese Textbooks Committee has already begun its work, it might consider in future to give some appropriate form of assistance to this Committee to publish some Chinese textbooks. If financial assistance comes from public revenue, the public might think that the Government is also involved in their publication and would thus think that the contents of these textbooks are not objective enough. But if a Chinese Language Foundation is set up, the objectivity of the textbooks will be beyond doubt if their financial assistance comes from an independent
foundation.
Secondly, English is generally used as the medium of
communication among Hong Kong's professional services.
Professionals (e.g. doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, etc.) mostly receive their education or training in English. But in view of future developments and the need of localizing professional services, active measures should be taken to promote Chinese translation. If a Chinese Language Foundation is formed, this work could be promoted by the Foundation, e.g. by setting up an ad hoc committee under the Foundation to liaise with various professions to fully implement this work and to allocate some of its resources to finance research and translation work. One of its objectives should be the organization of local professional examinations with the addition of Chinese test papers and the option to answer in Chinese.