Samoan

The roots of Samoan can be found with the Polynesian migration to what is now considered Samoa and American Samoa. Originally, Samoan was very much an oral language, meaning that culture, traditions, and knowledge were passed down verbally, often through songs and storytelling. Interaction with Europeans in the 18th century would come to influence the language as well, introducing new words and concepts, and Christian missionaries would come to help shape the written form of the language through Bible translations.

Nevertheless, Samoan remains a cultural marker of pride and heritage, as anti-colonial resistance maintained the language through German and New Zealand rule. Even now, as American Samoa continues to be under American rule, Samoan continues to be spoken proudly by the people of Samoa, American Samoa, and further.

Dictionaries are written to describe languages, meaning that the rules and regulations of the languages that we speak are descriptive rather than prescriptive—there’s no rule book that tells us how languages have to work. In this sense, different languages function in different ways to describe different things, and they develop from their own different contexts.

All of this is to say that direct translations are not easy, and often aren’t even possible. It takes a careful, respectful, cultural understanding of both languages to know exactly what an accurate translation looks like, and how an accurate translation needs to be done. Without a solid cultural understanding, translations fall flat and are often even incomprehensible.