Creating the written language from the spoken by translation: a study in Papua New Guinea

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Masahiko NOSE (Shiga University)

Abstract
This study illustrates translation from English to Amele, a language of Papua New Guinea. Our
translation process assists in analyzing grammatical characteristics of Amele and in understanding
the cultural setting of Papua New Guinea. We can clarify our interpretations of cultural aspects by
contrasting the West with New Guinea. Finally, this study claims that there are advantages to using
parallel texts for linguistic and cultural research; however, we must look at other factors to fully
interpret cultural differences, including Asian contexts.

1. Introduction
There are around 850 native languages
spoken in Papua New Guinea. They are
mainly classified in two groups: Trans-New
Guinea and Austronesian languages.
Trans-New Guinea languages are the
languages of the people who came to the
island of New Guinea 3000050000 years ago.
In contrast, Austronesians arrived there
50007000 years ago. This study deals with
one of the Trans-New Guinea languages,
Amele. Amele is spoken in the northwest area
of Madang Province, Figure 1.
We first briefly illustrate the
characteristics of Amele grammar and then
we introduce our task of translating folk tales
together with Amele speakers. This study
attempts to clarify grammatical differences
among Amele, English, and Japanese and cultural differences among New Guinea, the West, and
Asia by contrasting parallel Amele, English, and Japanese texts.
Section 2 illustrates the basic grammatical properties of Amele. Section 3 provides examples of
translated sentences and highlights the differences among English, Japanese, and Amele. Section 4 is
a discussion of the parallel texts, seeking to explain cultural variation. Section 5 concludes the paper.

2. Background information about Amele
Amele, consisting of four dialects, is spoken by approximately 5000 people. Almost every
speaker is a bilingual of Tok Pisin. Amele people live in a suburban area near Madang town. They
retain traditional lifestyles (eating traditional food made with no gas or water supply) with the
addition of several technological tools, such as mobile phones and oil generators. Naturally, new
Figure 1: Amele-speaking place in the New
Guinea Island (based on the World Atlas of
Language Structures, 2005)
technological and everyday words are borrowed from English into Amele.
Amele is a strict SOV word order with a nominative-accusative case system. It has 10
postpositions for marking nouns and rich verbal inflection. Roberts (1987) has already provided
grammatical descriptions of Amele based on the Haia dialect. In contrast, I examined the Huar
dialect and have provided brief grammatical descriptions of Amele based on this dialect (Nose 2013a,
2013b). There are several differences between Haia and Huar. For example, direct and indirect object
agreement markings are observed in Haia but not in Huar, as shown in (1) and (2).

(1) Haia: Roberts (1987:280)
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Uqa jo ceh-ad-en
3s house build-3p-3s.remote past
He built houses.
(2) Huar:
a. Window osodu-ga
window open-todays past
The window opened.
b. Ija window osodu-ga
1s window open-todays past
I opened the window.

In (1), the verb cehaden displays an agreement marking for a 3rd person singular subject and a 3rd
person plural direct object. In the Huar sentences in (2), the verbal forms osoduga in (2a) and (2b)
are identical; however, their subjects are different (3rd person singular in (2a) and 1st person singular
in (2b)). Also, (2b) has a direct object, window, whereas (2a) is intransitive. Moreover, I found that
Huar speakers do not formulate tense distinctions in terms of present and past, although tense
variations, such as present, todays past, yesterdays past, and remote past, occur as verbal inflection.
Thus, the Haia dialect (Roberts 1987) and the Huar dialect (my field) have different grammatical
properties; moreover, Amele grammar is gradually becoming more simple.

3. Creating parallel texts by translation
This section explains how the informants and I translated the texts into Amele. Amele is
exclusively used in oral environments, and there are few written texts aside from the New Testament.
Therefore, we have started the translation work to create written texts from spoken discourse. After
careful deliberation, we decided to translate world folk tales, as shown in Figure 2 (cf. Stolz 2007)
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.
First, Amele people roughly know stories like Snow White, and second, we can conduct a contrastive
linguistic study using the parallel texts. For these reasons, we chose Folk Tales from Around the
World, including Snow White, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Hansel and Gretel, Three Little Pigs,
and Pandoras box. Another supporting factor is that there is a bilingual English and Japanese edition.
We can create a kind of Rosetta stone, with parallel texts in the three languages.
The informant who knows English and I translated the texts together and later, other informants
checked the translated sentences and information flow. The following examples in (3) illustrate the
AmeleEnglishJapanese translations.

(3) The parallel texts (Snow White C1):
a. English
Once upon a time, long long ago, there lived a beautiful queen, and one winter, as she sat
sewing at her window, she pricked her thumb and three drops of blood fell into the snow. She
looked at the blood through the black window frame and she thought to herself how wonderful it
would be to have a daughter as white as snow, as red as blood, with hair as black as that black
window frame.
b. Amele
Sain osona, queen ja ac bahic oso birori. Win sain osona, uqan window-na bilimec etec samah
dodon, uqa ebe neel-na bocob gora ied gorodumei sinudunu-nuwen. Uqa gora feen window
asrec-na, odimei uqa dodo isdon, odi melaid oso senene sinu-inigwe. Odim goroc ac gorani inigwe.
Gosi asrec window asrec inigwec.
c. Japanese
Mukashi mukashi, sono mata mukashi, aru tokoro-ni utsukushii okisakisama-ga sunndeimashita.
Aru fuyu-nokoto, madobe-ni suwatte nuimono-wo shiteitatoki-ni oyayubi-wo sashite oshimaininari,
chi-ga santeki, soto-no-yuki-ni ochimachita. Kuroi madowaku-notokoro-de sonochi-wo goran-ni
natta okisakisama-wa kokoro-ni omoimashita. Yuki-noyou-ni shiroku, chi-noyouni akaku, kono
madowaku-noyouni kuroi kamino musume-ga umaretara donna-ni iideshou.

In (3), the English phrases once upon a time, long long ago are written
differently in Amele. In Amele, the phrase sain osona literally indicates
time one, and it means once upon a time. Next, there are many
English-based words in Amele; queen, win (winter), window, and neel
(needle). They are borrowed through Tok Pisin, an English-based creole
language. In fact, there are no equivalent words for queen and needle
in traditional Amele society. Amele had been isolated from the so-called
Western world for a long time, and therefore, Western words and
modern technological words have been borrowed after the 20th century.
There are many English loanwords in Japanese as well; however, there is
no English-based loanword in (3c). In Japanese, queen is translated with
the Japanese word okisaki-sama.
Moreover, we uncovered peculiar discourse characteristics of Amele in
the process of our translation work. They involve the use of discourse
markers and a demonstrative pronoun, shown in (4).

(4) Observed usages of Amele texts (Nose 2013b):
a. discourse markers: odocob and then, odi like, like this
b. demonstrative pronoun: uju that

First, the form odocob means then, and then, and functions as a conjunction. It is frequently used
to connect two sentences in the translations, as shown in (5).
Figure 2: Source of
the parallel text
translation tasks

(5) Odocob uqa ayan snow-white boin. (Snow White c2)
And then 3s name-poss snow white call-3s.past
And then she called Snow White.

Next, in (6), the shortened form of odocob, odi, which has a similar meaning, like this, then.
Meyerhoff (2011:253-257) examined similar forms: like this in English and olsem in Bislama (an
English-based creole spoken in Vanuatu), claiming that they have an effect of introducing discourse.

(6) Odi fii ija iteiga, elnuc ija uqa kec bahic gabigina. (Snow White c10)
Then suppose 1s give what 1s 3s like too much love
Then give it to me, because I cannot live without her.

Finally, the demonstrative pronoun uju in Huar
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, which is frequently used in the translation texts,
carries a sense of remarkableness. In (7), the demonstrative has a deictic meaning and it is used to
specify someone or something during discourse.

(7) Witic uju-na uqan abi-aya uju madocob qe uur uju iriton. (Snow White c3)
Night that-postp 3s-poss work-man that talk heart that cooking
That night, she ordered the cook to put them in a stew and she ate them for dinner.

4. Discussion
This section discusses two points concerning our work translating spoken language to written
Amele texts. First, we illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of the translated parallel texts and
then we discuss the cultural findings concerning the West, Asia, and New Guinea by contrasting the
parallel texts (cf. Enfield 2002).
Concerning our translation method, native speakers of Amele and I translated from English to
Amele. This process involved the task of creating written texts from spoken discourse (cf. Mosel
2009). This is the way in which Amele written texts were created, similar to the New Testament. The
New Testament was translated into Amele for the purpose of Christian missionary. We translated folk
tales not only for the purpose of linguistic research and creating parallel texts but also for
entertainment and education. Stolz (2007) used Harry Potter and The Little Prince for his contrastive
linguistic research; however, it has been a problem to publish them due to copyright issues
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.
Moreover, translated folk tales such as Snow White and Three Little Pigs can help Amele children
acquire their native language. When I read Snow White aloud in Amele, every child was excited to
listen to it. There are also some disadvantages to our translation method. We focused only on
translating English folk tales, not writing down any folk tales of the Amele people. The quality of the
translation is another problem. Although we checked the translated texts repeatedly, we are
nevertheless not completely confident in our translations.
Let us turn to the cultural facts found by our translations. English is spoken worldwide, yet it is
based on Western viewpoints, and Japanese is based on East Asian viewpoints. In contrast, Amele
still retains aspects of the traditional lifestyle of New Guinea, and at the same time, it is gradually
accepting Western and Asian cultures (the former mainly from Australia and the latter mainly from
Indonesia, Thailand, and other Asian countries). We can point out several cultural characteristics in
the texts, as shown in (8) and (9).

(8) Personal pronouns (Snow White)
a. English: she, he
b. Japanese: konokata (this person), okisakisama (queen), oujisama (prince), shirayuki hime
(Snow White)
c. Amele: queen, king melac (prince), uqa (he/she), Snow White
(9) Adjective
Amele: mec bahic: good, beautiful, nice, wonderful, fine, healthy (cf. mec qee bahic: bad)

Example (8) shows that the use of personal pronouns are different among the languages. English
prefers using personal pronouns (he and she), and their gender system is binary. However, in
Japanese, third person pronouns (kare for he, and kanojo for she) are not used in the Japanese texts.
Instead, the demonstrative form kono kata (this person) or the original form such as shirayuki hime
(Snow White) is repeatedly used in the texts. In Amele, the third person singular pronoun uqa refers
to both males and females and is therefore ambiguous in terms of gender. Therefore, Snow White,
queen, and king melac are frequently used in the texts.
Next in (9), the adjective me bahic has various meanings, and its negative form mec qee bahic
indicates bad. In fact, there is no independent word for bad in Amele, indicating a limited
number of vocabulary items. Regarding relations between language and culture, Deutscher (2010)
claims that every language has a language glass, and the cultures are defined by the glasses.
Vocabulary size is one factor defining culture, and there is also a dividing line between languages of
illiterate societies and those with a written tradition (Deutscher 2010:110). In case of Amele, the
number of vocabulary items is lesser than in English and Japanese; thus, one word carries more
meanings, as shown by (8) and (9). Moreover, Amele has another strategy of borrowing
English-based Western words. Our translation work, which aimed to precisely confirm the relation
between words and their meanings, indicates that Amele employs several special use of discourse
connectors and loanwords.

5. Conclusion
We introduced our translation task focusing on one Papuan language of New Guinea, which has
allowed us to create written texts from spoken discourse. Moreover, we illustrated some contrasting
properties in parallel English and Japanese texts. The findings of the study are as follows.
First, we clarified some specific grammatical/lexical properties of Amele by analyzing parallel
texts. In particular, Amele displays several types of discourse markers and special use of the
demonstrative uju. Lexically, Amele uses loanwords from English and Tok Pisin. Second, we found
that there is a limit to cross-cultural comparison through translations. We can identify the number of
vocabulary items in the parallel texts, but we cannot fully access Amele culture from the translated
texts. Further work is needed to interpret the cultural context of the language; however, the parallel
texts are useful resources not only for linguistics but also for cultural studies.

NOTES
1. I would like to thank the villagers in Sein, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea for their data and kindness. I claim
sole responsibility for any errors. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 23720211. I would
like to thank Enago (www.enago.jp) for the English language review.
2. In Amele, the transcription c represents a glottal stop, and q is a voiced dorso-labiovelar plosive. Abbreviations: s,
singular; p, plural; past, past tense; poss, possessive marker; postp, postposition.
3. It might be better to collect traditional folk tales in the Amele area; however, the people there have already become
Christians, and the indigenous folk tales have almost all been lost.
4. Roberts (1987: 215) describes three types of demonstratives in Amele: i, this; eu, that, near listener; ou, that,
near neither speaker not listener. However, there are five types of demonstratives in Huar: i, this; eu, that,
invisible; au, that, visible; ono, that/there; uju, that, with a discovery nuance.
5. I have obtained permission to translate Folk Tales from Around the World from the publisher.

References
Texts: Eigo-de yomu Sekai mukashibanashi (Folk Tales from Around the World), Book 1. Benjamin Woodward,
2006. Tokyo: The Japan Times.

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