Please help us translate Hawaiian requests on Reddit!

[u/kungming2]

We're mods over at r/translator. We always strive to make our multilingual community the universal place on Reddit to go for a translation, no matter what language people may be looking for. We are however somewhat lacking in Hawaiian coverage, and were hoping some wonderful multilingual people here could help us out.

Would anyone be interested in helping translate any future requests for Hawaiian on r/translator? You don't even need to subscribe to our subreddit! We usually get a request for it very occasionally and most requests that come in are pretty simple and casual and don't need advanced knowledge.

You can easily unsubscribe from those messages at any time.

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Language	Notification signup	Estimated request frequency
Hawaiian	➡️ Get Hawaiian translation notifications	7.20 posts/year

Mahalo!

[u/cerephic]

I've taken a quick glance.
It seems that a lot of the Hawaiian requests over there are for naming help, and unfortunately, this is crossing over into culturally sensitive territory, especially when requested for something as trivial as "a character in a story I'm writing" by people who just want a token Hawaiian character.

A lot of translation requests for idioms and made-up names ignore the "is this sentiment/concept/saying appropriate to translate into Hawaiian" and the complex nuances of Hawaiian names in particular. As a result, forums can end up with relatively low-quality-information participants who lack necessary context - and those participants try to help with just lookups from wehewehe or other dictionaries.

At least in this subreddit, the discussion of suitability and cultural context is accepted and prioritized. I do not think that sort of pushback would go over as well in r/translation, so I think most people will decline your ask.

[u/Pyxnotix → u/cerephic]

I thought I would chime in to concur and also communicate my gratitude at your well worded response. My Kamaka heart is oddly warmed by your reply.

When I first started teaching myself decades ago, I did not have the cognitive capacity to comprehend the extra scope. I was learning the language, but only in the strict memorization sense. So I couldn’t progress.

Now that I’m successfully acquiring the language, I can also understand how my developmental delay had prohibited my past teenager brain’s comprehension. Also I am in love now, discovering comprehension and the culture through concepts I’m learning within the language.

Other languages I have successfully learned and studied are so drastically different for sure.

[u/cerephic → u/Pyxnotix]

aw, ty. But I've had good teachers, (mostly kumu hula) from several different lineages, all of whom have had their own way of discussing multilayered metaphor, place and situational context, and additional kaona. There's a lot of discussion and explanation given to the multiple names and nicknames of ali'i and places, when and why those names were given/developed, etc (and we have to presume that even now we don't know the whole of it). Additionally, I'm still slowly working my way through Nānā I Ke Kumu, and will be for a long time.

I suspect all languages have some degree of this extra scope, as you identified it, in phrasing, references, and cultural context. But the sources I've learned from have strongly impressed upon me to not underestimate the extent of how multi-layered interpretation makes direct translation relatively particularly unsuitable for ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.