What role do Western authors play in propagating misinformation about Malay terms?

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Western authors have helped spread a false Malay term by repeating it from one another without checking it properly.

Western writers and publications have repeatedly presented “pisan zapra” as a Malay phrase meaning “the time needed to eat a banana,” even though the spelling is wrong and “zapra” was never a Malay word. The term surfaced in BBC trivia content, in Ella Frances Sanders’ 2014 book Lost in Translation, and later in Josh Pachter’s 2016 short story Pisan Zapra and Adam Jacot de Boinod’s 2007 and 2010 books.
The BBC and other Western outlets repeated the same claim
The BBC trivia show QI featured “pisan zapra” as its Phrase of the Day, and later said its source was a BBC online review of Sanders’ book. That review presented the phrase in bold and defined it as “the time needed to eat a banana,” with a clock and banana illustration reinforcing the claim.
Ella Frances Sanders’ book gave the phrase wider visibility
Sanders’ Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World included “PISAN ZAPRA” with the same meaning. The book was promoted as a New York Times bestseller for four consecutive months, an Amazon Best Book award winner in 2014, and a seller of 100,000 copies, which helped give the term a wider audience.
Josh Pachter and Adam Jacot de Boinod kept the term in circulation
Josh Pachter titled a November 2016 Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine story Pisan Zapra after finding the term in Sanders’ book. Adam Jacot de Boinod had already written in The Meaning of Tingo that “pisan zapra” was a Malay word for the time needed to eat a banana, and later said he had found his love for foreign words while researching for QI.
The pattern points to reliance on a single shaky source
The account suggests these writers relied on one respected Anglophone source instead of checking with Malaysians or verifying the word locally. The result was a chain of repetition across books, magazines and BBC content, with the false term treated as authentic and even shared by content farms and websites.

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What role do Western authors play in propagating misinformation about Malay terms?

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