Toki Pona translation

Hi everyone! toki!

I'd like to start translating all comics into Toki Pona. Given it has some quirks, I thought I'd write a little outline.

It's a conlang - is that an issue?

I remember this thread about Klingon etc. which might not 100% vibe with the CC licenses, but luckily, the situation is different with Toki Pona - for one thing, the official dictionary is officially in the public domain. Now, I don't know if at some point, conlangs could swamp the list of translated languages - or if that would even be a bad thing. There is an Esperanto translation, but you could argue it's different because of its large user base or other things... I'm staying out of that discussion =D If the Toki Pona translation doesn't get on the website, that's fine, I'll still make translations, but I'd probably be less motivated to finish translating all and continue translating.

Scope of translation

I'd like to do all episodes, of course. But let me go over a couple of (self-imposed?) restrictions:

• I'd like to make translations as "uncontroversial" as possible, meaning I'd like to get as close to Pu grammar and words. In other words, only use the 120 words in the official book. Community words like "monsuta" are very, very good (especially for P&C) - but I think it should be accessible to people who haven't heard of the new words.
• I have no idea how to deal with onomatopoeia. Tokiponizing is a bit of a mess and writing "mu" for everything is too hillarious for me to attempt. At least for now, I'm going to leave the English onomatopoeia - but as with everything, feedback, suggestion, help and objections are more than welcome!
• While I don't want to lexicalise compounds, I should definitely keep track of tokiponizations with the translation names references sheet.
• I'll have a look at website translation, but I have spent 0 thought on that yet

Special treatment

Just a couple of notes of how Toki Pona would affect some implementations differently than, uh, English.

• Toki Pona doesn't have a language code. But it looks like "tp" isn't used for anything, so for Pepper&Carrot, I'd like to suggest that?
• sitelen pona (and its derivatives) is a wonderful script/font for Toki Pona. However, I hope it's not controversial to say that it's not a top priority to have an alternative script version of the translation. At least for me personally, I want to focus on putting the translation itself together and turning it into sitelen pona would be an extra step that I think would be talked about separately? Afaik alternate scripts would basically make it another new translation project.
• Since Toki Pona treats proper nouns as adjectivized loan words, the title will have to be adapted. Probably something in the format of "jan [Pepper] & soweli [Carrot]". My suggestion: try to put the "jan" in smaller font over the tokiponized version of "Pepper" and analogically, put "soweli" in smaller font over the tokipoinued version of "Carrot". See translation notes below for thoughts about tokiponizations.

Episode 1 translation attempt

English	Toki Pona
Pepper & Carrot	jan Pepa & soweli Kawa
Episode 1: The Potion of Flight	wan nanpa wan: telo pi tawa waso
...and the last touch	sin la... pini!
SHH SHH	SHH SHH
...mmm probably not strong enough	...a. ken la ona o mute
PLOP PLOP	PLOP PLOP
ha... perfect	a... pona a!
NO! Don't even think about it	ike! o pali ala
SPLASH	SPLASH
Happy ?!	sina pilin pona anu seme?!

Translation notes

• Tokiponization
• • First off, a translation of episode 24 exists here (and here's the blog text in French in two parts because mi ne parolas Esperanton) which could be a useful reference or resource for ideas (especially things like "kulupu Pakala" for Chaosah). Anyway, the tokiponization there is "jan Pipo en soweli Jejo". This seems to come from the Esperanto version "Pipro kaj Karoĉjo", with "Pipro" becoming "Pipo" and Jejo... I have no idea. Usually, you'd try to tokiponize from the "local language" or the more common usage, so I'm going to try to derive it from English/French
• • Pepper is somewhat easy to tokiponize, I went with Pepa over Pepe because 1) my gut tells me English veers towards [a] over [e] in the last sillable and 2) why not avoid a certain meme frog. Alternatively, we could go with a more meaningful name, like jan Pimeja ("black") or something like that (but it's more unusual outside of personification of the noun I think)
• • Carrot is a bit harder because there are more options. From English pronunciation, it would become Kawo if "wo" wasn't an illegal syllable in Toki Pona, which would turn into "o", and because it's not the first sillable, separated by "j", which would give us soweli Kajo. But sometimes people turn "wo" into "wa", which imo preserves the original pronunciation better, so it's Kawa. Alternatively, from French, it would become Kako, and a trilled or tapped "r" would become Kalo (which I personally prefer over Kako). A more "meaningful" name could be soweli Jelo or soweli Loje or something like that (but again, this would be a more unexpected translation)
• "no word for X exists in Toki Pona" is going to be quite common. I translated "episode" as "wan" (which roughly means "part" in this context). The other possibility I can immediately think of is "lipu", but that might be more of a bigger collection
• This isn't going to be an issue for the first two episodes, but as far as counting is concerned, we should probably use the "complex" number system (luka=5,mute=20,ala=100) so that "episode 6" becomes "wan nanpa luka wan" instead of "wan nanpa tu tu tu" before the higher numbers get too long =D
• "there are many ways to translate this word" is going to be another common thing. Finding the cross section of "most immediate translation" (from the perspective of the translator) and "most understandable translation" (from the perspective of the reader) is going to be an interesting challenge considering episodes go into more complex words later on. A potion is probably telo over ko, it looks a lot like telo in the comic, and it's not supposed to be edible (at least from Pepper's perspective), so I'd also avoid moku in this case. While "tawa waso" and "tawa kon" would both be "most immediate" for me, I think "tawa waso" is the less ambiguous translation for "flight".
• Dialogue was translated according to meaning, and aren't direct at all. Now that I look at it, it also means the sentences are more "simple". I guess that tells you a lot about my approach at Toki Pona.^^

Uh, whoops, wall of text. Sorry about that. Thoughts?