Miao Poya

The 2018 Development of National Languages Act stipulates the government agencies to provide interpretation services when citizens participating in administrative, legislative, and judicial procedures can freely choose to use their national languages,[15] so the Legislative Yuan activated the interpreter service for the parliament session in real time accordingly.[16] On 27 September 2021, after following the steps to apply in advance with 3 Taiwanese interpreters been present ready,[17] Legislator, Chen Po-wei of the Taiwan Statebuilding Party proceeded his scheduled questioning in Taiwanese during the session of Foreign and National Defense Committee.[18][19] Ministrer of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng rejected to speak Taiwanese, nor accepted the interpreter's real-time service at site, but brought the deputy minister Zong-hsiao Li as his own interpreter, and insisted in the 3-way translation pattern sentence by sentence.[17] Chiu repeatedly interrupted the question process by asking Chen to speak Mandarin Chinese for easier communication, or the session time cannot be lengthened to accommodate the interpretation,[18][19] but Li is not a linguistic professional, hence his translation contains contextual errors,[18][19][17] so Chairman Chen I-hsin intervened when the argument occurred, and introduced the existing synchronized interpretation in progress as the solution same as the common conference practice in the other countries; but Chiu never picked up the earset, yet insisted his way till the session run out of time.[18][19] Chen later apologized to the public for the good intention of practicing the national language law being turned into a linguistic communication tragedy, and condemned Chiu for "bullying" (鴨霸), but Chiu denied the allegation and claimed that a language is a tool of communication.[17] The parliamentary interpretation service were temporarily suspended afterwards pending on better communication in the future - consequently the parliament members and media editorials such as Kuan Bi-ling and Taipei Times commented that Language is not just a tool of communication as Chiu said, but also an identity of feelings and culture.[20] Miao also explained that the multi-lingual working environment is essential for a healthy mind without the "Chinese Language Supremacy" (華語至上) attitude to achieve the international level in diversity, equality and mutual respect for a modern state.[17]