Hawaiian Google

Hawaiian is now one of more than 125 “interface languages” available on Google. “It’s the capstone of a lot of work,” said Keola Donaghy, an assistant professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaii-Hilo. “We’ve been doing this work for 18 years, simply trying to make it easier for people who speak Hawaiian to use these kinds of technologies.”

Donaghy began working on the massive translation project sometime late last year. “I did the actual translation from beginning to end, and then I consulted with my colleagues at the university who have worked on these projects in the past,” Donaghy said. “I wanted to be very consistent — such as how you say ‘Go to this menu and select this’ — or people may become confused.” The results of the search are still in English, although the user can select a preference for Web pages written in more than 40 other main languages.

What’s Hawaiian for ‘browsing’ the Web? “Over the years, we usually face the debate of do we want to ‘Hawaiianize’ an English word, or take an old Hawaiian word and give it a new meaning,” he said. He explained some of the challenges in translating terms, such as “browsing” or “surfing,” into Hawaiian. “People use the term ‘surf the Internet’ and they’ll say ‘he’e nalu’ which is literally surfing the ocean out on a board,” he explained. “But we use ‘kele,’ which is what you do when you’re steering a canoe. So we chose that as you’re navigating the net.”

The Hawaiian language interface actually launched on Apple’s Safari browser first because Donaghy had worked with Apple to ensure that the language’s diacritical marks and characters were available on the company’s computers. “Now, it comes with every computer that they ship,” he said. Some Apple computer users who had selected Hawaiian as their primary language for other programs noticed a couple of weeks ago that Google’s search terms started appearing in Hawaiian, too.

See and hear the Hawaiian word for common internet related terms.