Toki Pona Translation
2005-01-31
Toki Pona is a small invented language that I wrote about recently in a
fairly critical manner. I therefore had to expect that the Law of
Criticising Invented Languages, which dictates that someone will reply
to you in that language in the attempt to force you to learn it, would
be upheld, and it was. Someone calling themselves Jan Wasolitawa replied
to my essay with the following:
mi pilin e ni: sina toki ike e toki pona. ni li ike.
"waso telo" li nimi pona. tan seme la sina wile e ni: nimi mute pi
waso? ni li pakala.
mi pilin e ni: sina sona ala e nasin pi toki pona. mi toki e ni:
nasin pona li pona. sina sona ala sona e toki mi?
P.S. toki pi nanpa suli li ike mute. o weka e nanpa suli. ni li
nasin mani! nasin mani li ike! ni li pakala!
— Jan Wasolitawa
Thankfully I have a friend who's learning Toki Pona, and this was a good
opportunity for him to test his skills. At the same time, I decided to
race him by attempting an automatic translation using a couple of Python
scripts. He beat me both in speed and quality, but we still think that
the script is close enough to Babelfish quality to warrant release, so
I've made a Toki Pona to English Translation Service using it (with
source and nimi). Here's one of the ways in which it translates the
comment I got:
I emotion such that: you your language negative such language good.
this is negative.
"bird liquid" is name simplicity. from which it's said you your to
want such that: word very belonging to winged animal? that is blunder.
I emotion such this: you your knowledge no such way belonging to
talking good. I language such that: manner good is simplicity. you your
wisdom not knowledge such language I?
P.S. language belonging to number -th tall is negative many. O hey!
away such number -th tall. that is way material wealth! way money is
bad! that is blunder!
— People Wasolitawa
It actually came out much better than I expected. Toki Pona's ambiguity
is through the roof, so it's only possible to get a summary
understanding even if you speak the language. That's the nature of the
beast. As Cody put it:
In order to speak Toki Pona correctly, you have to imagine yourself
on an island, totally separate from all civilization, roughing it jungle
style and such. Thus a flashlight would really be a "box of light".
— Jan Nasacody (Cody Woodard)
As for the comment itself, our combined understanding of it from both
manual and automatic translations is that J. Wasolitawa doesn't like my
criticism of the language and thinks that I want too much from it. One
of the best bits of translation was Cody's "there's been a clashing of
zens"; my zen isn't the same as Toki Pona's zen. Well I refute that: I
think that the concept is fine, but the implementation leaves a lot to
be desired, as can hopefully be seen from our combined translation
effort. The fact remains that English allows one to get much closer to
Toki Pona nature via its expansive vocabulary, because in Toki Pona you
have to be circumlocutionary, whereas in English you can use words such
as "circumlocutionary" to sum up what'd be a whole paragraph of repeated
words in Toki Pona whilst still missing the point.
And we think the P.S. is something to do with numbers being a nasty
side-effect of commerce. Which is just wonderful. How else can one count
how many butterflies have been seen on a particular day but with
numbers? If I've misunderstood the Toki Pona way and that way is
actually to eradicate every single thing of meaning and value to us,
then perhaps there is a clashing of zens after all. After all, as D.T.
Sukuki said, "Zen is not nihilism". But I don't think Toki Pona is
either: it's quite pretty sometimes.
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