dongzong

To kickstart the New Year, we spent two full days with The United School Committees Associations of Malaysia for the Personal Data Protection Act training. Which is really a mouthful to say, so we will go by its more well known alias, Dong Zong.

Now, this is a rather unique engagement, for the simple fact that both our lead trainers in PDPA do not speak a lick of Mandarin. The first is proficient in Malay (as he is Malay), the second (which is me) is proficient in English – although he is technically a Chinese. While I am Chinese by birth, my proficiency in language is as follows: English, Malay, Cantonese, German, Minionese, Mandarin. That is to say, I can talk in German and Minionese far better than I can talk in Mandarin. For those who are wondering, Minionese is the official language used by the Minions, the yellow, annoying creatures that so love bananas and my sons so love watching.

Thankfully, we had another colleague who was proficient in Mandarin, but needed a bit of update on the subject, as he was from our technical deployment team for SIEM. So we had a bit of crash course for both. I had to do the introductions, demo and clarifications in broken mando-canto-eng-nese, and he had to crash course the updated PDPA training.

We can usually do the training quite comfortably, including the technical demonstrations (which consist of us actually searching for personal information on the internet during the training itself, demonstrating how easy it is if you know which tools and how/where to look). But this was made infinitely harder because of my lack of command in the language. To put it simply, it was like wrestling with a 300 pound catfish or a giant python. You know what to say in English, but the translation facility in your brain is broken and you just can’t get it out of your mouth and what ends up coming up is meaningless dribble, which my 2 year old son would probably appreciate, but not a roomful of teachers and educationists…who are championing the Mandarin language and the progressive advancement of the Chinese community as a whole. It would be great if I told them I was actually Middle Eastern or Eskimo, then they won’t expect so much from me – but I look like a total Chinese, so there’s no hiding the complete embarrassment of not being able to speak in Mandarin.

To Dong Zong’s credit, they did take it in stride, and our Mandarin-speaking colleague performed admirably (I think, since I did not understand him) and at the end of the two days, we were very well appreciated because somehow between the both of us, we got the job not just done, but done with great feedback and participation from the group. There were some really excellent Q and A time, which I had to answer in English/broken Cantonese and got translated properly. We even had a chance to go through Dong Zong’s implementation of PDPA and did a impromptu, live commentary on the areas to improve in privacy notice and other policies.

For a non-legal, practical way to implement and assess your company on PDPA, please drop us an email at avantedge@pkfmalaysia.com. We have done a lot of practical training on compliance to PDPA, and taken a lot of good info from the PDPA Commission itself. Our content is based on the one we developed with the deputy commissioner of PDPA during the time when we worked together to deliver our training to companies in Cyberjaya. Over the years we have enhanced it with demonstrations, as well as updated with the latest development of Malaysia’s Personal Data Protection Act.