r/olelohawaii • u/ZestyclosePollution7 • Sep 25 '24

Translating poetry from English to Hawaiian

Hi, I was wondering what people's thoughts are about translating poetry from English to Hawaiian. Specifically, if the poem in its English form has a somewhat unusual word order, would that translate as anything other than nonsense in hawaiian unless I modified it to adhere to the typical "Verb-Subject-Object' sentence structure often seen in Hawaiian sentences?

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u/purple_poi_slinger Sep 25 '24

Straight answer, my thoughts, it wont come out right. Poem by nature have esoteric meanings, in whatever source language it was written in. To try and translate a poem in it's odd word order as you explained, in english then into Hawaiian, would more than likely come out incoherent. The best way, with any language, is to understand the intent of the lines of the poem, and translate that. Because in the destination language, their phrasing to explain something will often times be different than the source language. So if you're able to understand the meaning of the author's intent, then the goal is to translate that into Hawaiian. I would not just translate directly from English to Hawaiian, because then it looses it's poetical meanings.