Translation notes

Translating Lewis Carroll's works is a very interesting endeavor, as there is as much timeless charm as there are highly specific cultural references and wordplay that make for great challenges if you want to infuse the translation with as much charm as the original had.

Translation into Toki Pona also makes for very unique situations, mainly because the preferred level of detail in the language is very different from what you usually find in natural languages. So I find myself making very different decisions about how to translate into Toki Pona compared to how I'd translate into another language.

And that's why I decided to start taking notes on the things that catch my attention in this translation process. I wonder what I'll think of these decisions some years from now as I become a stronger speaker of Toki Pona and have more experience in writing in the language.

nasin mi

I don't think I deviate much from the "neutral" nasin of Toki Pona. But one thing I do sometimes is to omit the subject of a la-phrase when that subject is the same as the one in the main phrase. Like in the homepage of this website you will see jo e soweli ni1 la lipu ni li pona mute a rather than lipu ni li jo e soweli ni1 la lipu ni li pona mute a.

Chapter 1

The first decision I made when going into this project was on whether or not I should abridge the story. And while my usual instincts for translation make me want to not drop anything from the original text, trying to cram every single sentence of the original book into Toki Pona makes for a somewhat unpleasant text to read. That said, I still try to minimize what I abridge. The general principle I've been following is to keep every scene in the translation, even if the scenes are told in fewer sentences.

The first paragraph already gave me a challenge I had to stop and think about for a while: Alice's "And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?". I spent a while stuck on trying to translate the word 'use' literally in that sentence, before settling on translating it as her questioning why would anyone make books like that.

Then there is the part where Alice is falling through the rabbit hole. In the original she likes to say big words like latitude and longitude because she knows they are related to the subject she is thinking about and they make her feel smart, even if she doesn't actually know how to use them. In Toki Pona, the idea of her using jargon to sound smart just doesn't work. You could translate the concepts into the language, but it would sound artificial and kill the pacing of the joke. I decided to keep her musings about being headed to the center of the Earth or America and have that be the source of her feeling smart, despite having no idea what she is talking about.

Similarly, the comparison of "telescoping" into her body to shrink down could be translated into Toki Pona as acting like an ilo lukin pi (lukin mun), but I feel a more direct reference of vanishing her body parts into her body and becoming a little nena would feel more natural. That does lose the connection with the text using the telescope metaphor again for when she grows. But again, I thought avoiding jargon would sound more natural and compared her to a kasi suli instead.

I also chose to mark Alice's size changes with different head nouns, just because that sounded like fun.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 opens with Alice saying "Curiouser and curiouser" and a pedantic narrator calling her out for not speaking "good English". I went with a somewhat stuttered half-coherent sentence as my solution.

While trying to figure out why the events of to-day are so very queer, Alice once again tries to demonstrate her knowledge to check if she became one of her friends. Arithmetics in Toki Pona doesn't have a default set of symbols to indicate each of the operations, but I found other people online using kepeken for multiplication. I wonder if I'll ever use other arithmetical symbols in the language. But if I do, I think I'd go with en weka kepeken kipisi sewi1 anpa for the fundamental operations, exponents and roots.

She also recites a parody of a Victorian rhyme for the first time in this book. Fun fact: some of the poems she recites have been lost to time and we only know their titles because they are parodied in Alice. The reference is already lost for the modern English language reader, as "Against Idleness and Mischief" is not a known poem in our times. So I left Alice's attempts to prove herself smart with maths in charge of carrying the whole scene.

The translation solution to Alice's dialogue with the mouse in the lake of tears actually came to me in a dream. I was thinking about what to do with the scene earlier in the day and ended up dreaming I was translating it. In the original, Alice misquotes the vocative form of "oh muse", from her brother's Latin Grammar, as being the correct way to call "oh mouse". I changed the joke from misunderstood Latin to the obsolete pu meaning of akesi as "non-cute animal". I guess Alice's brother is a Tokiponist now.

And then I decided to work with Toki Pona's vagueness for Alice's lack of awareness of what is appropriate to discuss with a mouse. In the original, she keeps directly mentioning cats and dogs until the mouse gets too uncomfortable to remain talking to her. In toki pona, the vagueness of soweli allows her to talk about her cat without alarming the mouse... until she talks about how her soweli eats all the soweli lili.

Chapter 3

"'This is the driest thing I know.' said the mouse with an important air." In the original, the mouse attempts to dry everyone by telling the driest quotation of a history book he knows of. This one made me freeze and get stuck for a bit. But ended up finding a solution when I stopped focusing on the history lesson and thought that the mouse needs something long and boring that initially sounds like it would dry everyone out. So I went for a very literal "I'll talk of dryness" that leads into the mouse explaining about different forms of evaporation.

The term "caucus race" is probably a political joke about running around in circles and not deciding anything. I took that into account while deciding the tokiponized characters for the name, but it's mostly just a funny word.