Around November 1st last year I finally managed to translate a substantive text into Koa for the first time. Well, "substantive" may be a little subjective. But children's books -- while superficially simple -- actually access core pragmatics at a pretty deep level, to the point that I found this specific exercise completely impossible even to begin when I first tried five years ago.
As just one example, the title of this work, "Are You My Mother?" by P. D. Eastman, could be rendered into Koa in many different ways; if one were doing a mechanical translation exercise, this is probably how it would come out:
Ai Se-ni-mama?
QU 2SG-1SG-mama
But that translation would be completely pragmatically neutral, and as Allison pointed out to my consternation at the time, it doesn't really make sense in the context of the story. I tried to argue that, this perhaps not being the most astute baby bird we could ever imagine, he might genuinely have been asking the same sort of meaningless, vapid question over and over, and I even recorded audio of the whole story with that emphasis to try to prove it.
But she was right: as the baby bird wanders around making inquiries of various creatures, the information he seeks to get back is not equally weighted in terms of priority. For example, he's not looking for the answer "No, I'm your father." And if I imagined someone writing the story in Koa from scratch, with the intention of it being read to children, the bird's catchphrase would certainly not have been Ai Se Nimama?, but rather
Ai Se Sa Ni-mama?
QU 2SG FOC 1SG-mama
...in other words, "are you my mama? Is it you who is my mama?" And it was necessary to tune into that level of pragmatic sensitivity throughout the translation.
Another thing that frustrated this project in 2020 was that the narrative structure of young children's books tends to be very blow-by-blow: "Look, this is happening! Now look, that's happening!" Koa's presentative structures were in a prolonged state of infancy at that point, so it was very perplexing to go through the available options and find that none of them worked.
A good case -- and this illustrates why I got so impassably frustrated so quickly -- is the very first line of the story, "A mother bird sat on her egg." Again the mechanical translation would be
A ame-mother i eki pe ka múna-ta
INDEF bird-mother MAIN.CL sit BEN DEF egg-3SG
...but I had the strong sense that something presentative was going on here -- like Polish Szła dzieweczka do laseczka "Went a girl into the forest..." -- and I kept trying to make focus do a job it wasn't intended to:
*Eki sa a ame-mama...
sit FOC INDEF bird-mother
Despite all my hopes, that doesn't in fact mean "Hey check it out, so this mother bird was sitting on her egg, [and then the craziest thing happened!]" It means the nonsensical "It's sitting that a mother bird was doing on her egg," especially silly dropped out of the blue onto the first page of the story. What I needed was this:
A ame-mama vo éki-ne pe ka múna-ta
INDEF bird-mother PRES.CL sit-LOC BEN DEF egg-3SG
lit. "Behold, a mother bird sits there on her egg"
But this kind of structure where vo replaces i in presentative contexts didn't develop until fall 2024, and even now deciding when to use it feels like it requires a thrilling/terrifying amount of trust in my own intuition. This was also and especially the case with less textbooky ways of expressing desired meaning, terribly important in a children's book that isn't intended to sound like a stuffy drawing room. This kind of vernacular Koa style had simply never existed before, and I couldn't derive it from first principles: I just had to invent.
I like my translation, though it's not perfect -- there are still places where my choices feel too heavily influenced by English structure, semantics or idiom -- but I feel like it fulfills its purpose in showing what a Koa children's book might look and sound like. At some point perfection may not really exist, and one could tweak ad infinitum without really improving anything.
So then, below I present to you my translation, Ai Se Sa Nimama?* Here I'll reproduce only the Koa; in order not to make this post unmanageably long, this will be the first of a series, and I'll follow this up with interlinear and commentary.
Ai Se Sa Nimama?
ci le P. D. Eastman, palili ci le Iúliki Líkololu
A amemama vo ékine pe ka múnata.
Ka muna i hupa.
— Nikikíipa la ka amenéneni ko suo! — tasano.
Laa vo talapoi.
Nesala ka pesa, ka muna i hupa.
Hupa,
hupa,
hupa.
Ata...
...a amenene vo tule lapole!
— Nekea sa nimama? — tasano.
Tanasináeta nenaa.
— Vo niviháketa, — tasano.
Osala ka pesa vo talahe.
Lalovo, lalovo, lalovo!
Popo!
Ka amenene i navoi ko lehu.
Ala ko kave, tavoi.
— Hesena niluluta nimama, — tasano.
— Ai se sa nimama? — ka amenene i kusu a séneto.
Ka séneto i ienae, nae. Naa sa tasano.
— Ai se sa nimama? — ka amenene i kusu a móahe.
— Na, — ka móahe i sano.
— Ai se sa nimama? — ka amenene i kusu a kunu.
— Na semama sa ni. Kunu sa, — ka kunu i sano.
— Ai se sa nimama? — ka amenene i kusu a lémae.
— Ni mokea sa nicuteimi semama? — ka lémae i sano, — Lémae sa ni.
Ka amenene i luvu ve cumeti.
Ka séneto e ka móahe i natamama.
Ka kunu e ka lémae i natamama.
— Nikumemama, — ka amenene i sano, — niilo, iakitai.
» Nilulútata. Niculútata. IACÚ!
Iehetoa ka amenene vo nae a mea iso.
— SEKA sa nimama! — tasano.
Ka mea iso i sano — HUAUU!
— Ii, na! — ka amenene i sano, — Na nimama sa se.
» Huauu mupato sa se!
Ka Huauu i nose ka amenene i lanomu, lanomu, lanomu.
Sii hua i osu.
Ka Huauu vo iepane ka amenene i lai la ka puu.
Ka amenene i honekoto!
Iehetoa ka amemama vo lai.
— Niilo ka imi SEKA, — ka amenene i sano.
» Na séneto, na móahe, na kunu sa se.
» Na lémae, na Huauu sa.
» Ame sa se, e mama nika sa!
*What about capitalization conventions??? Another topic for the inexhaustible list...
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