‘Ka Hopita’: Hawaiian translation of ‘The Hobbit’ coming soon

[Digitonomy]

Many nights over the last year, Keao NeSmith would return to his home on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and think about hobgoblins. Not because he was afraid of the evil fantasy creature, but because he was translating J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” into Hawaiian…

Eventually he scrapped the search for some match with “goblin” and went with a Hawaiianized form of “orc,” or “’oaka” — in which the apostrophe represents a glottal stop — an actual Hawaiian word that refers to the gaping jaws of a dog that’s about to bite. Thus a hobgoblin became nui ’oaka, or "big orc.”…

Hawaiian is one of the most endangered of the Polynesian languages. It’s hoped that “Ka Hopita” will legitimize Hawaiian as an everyday language and boost the efforts of a new generation of Hawaiian speakers. “Ka Hopita,” which is set to be published on March 25 (a date important to Tolkien fans because it’s the day that Bilbo Baggins came home from his adventures), is the first Tolkien novel to appear in an indigenous language of the United States…

With his translations NeSmith joins a long tradition of Hawaiian literary translators dating to the 1800s, when Hawaiian newspapers serialized English novels such as Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” By 1900, one of the traditions among translators was to not Hawaiianize foreign names.

NeSmith followed that tradition, which made translating the name of ka hopita himself, “Bilbo Baggins,” quite easy. It’s just “Bilbo Baggins.”
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