Candidate's translated gibberish: If you choose me You choose 'You' to do 'You'

The new electoral system was supposed to do away with the war for preferential votes. Old habits though, die hard and many candidates continue to go about pasting cut-outs and posters of themselves, knowing full well that authorities would remove them.

Social media is a different political scenario altogether. With no means of policing propaganda on the web, candidates are making full use of social media to ‘market’ themselves to eligible voters, though the campaign needs to be carried out in a limited area or more specifically a ‘ward’.

The fact that they need to only market themselves to the voters of their wards makes no difference. Facebook pages of political parties too are promoting various candidates.

Some of them also get rather carried away when it comes to catchy slogans for themselves. This can produce some rather hilarious results. A case in point is a post being shared on social media of one unfortunate candidate contesting in Matara from a major political party.

The candidate had evidently made a direct translation of his slogan from Sinhala to English. The slogan in English reads "If you choose me You choose 'You' to do 'You.”’

What the original message said in Sinhala was: if you elect him you would be doing a service to yourself.

It didn’t take long for the image to go viral, with people pointing out the obvious unintended implication of the slogan. The post has now been taken down from the candidate’s Facebook profile, but is already widely available all over social media.