A PROBLEM IN TRANSLATION

1. Suppose you had the task to create a dictionary from German into English, and now in front of you the German word Rundfunkgerät must be expressed in English.

This is no great difficulty. Once you know what the word stands for, the English equivalent will be 'radio receiver'. But let us change the circumstances, so that the dictionary to be created is from German into a language spoken far up in the Amazon delta, spoken only by a handful of people in a small tribe - one of which happens to be you. Excepting you this little group of people have had no contact whatsoever with the outside civilization.

The task suddenly becomes very difficult, even if you were lucky enough to have been adopted by a German family in your early teens. You are fluent in both languages, but there is no word in this hypothetical Amazon language which comes even close to 'radio receiver'. They have never heard about electricity nor radio waves. They are a 'stone age' people.

It might come as a surprise to you to find that it would be equally difficult to translate many words from the language of such an isolated tribe into German (or English). But I believe it is so. We have never heard about the basic concepts which many of their words will refer to. They would be as 'outlandish' for us as radio receiver for them.

The situation on Easter Island before the 'discovery' of the island by the Europeans was not very much different. It is a very isolated island in the vast Pacific ocean and even contact with the rest of the Polynesians must have been rare. Therefore I ought to begin this dictionary by first trying to convey at least some basic knowledge of their 'unfamiliar landscape'.

It is a formidable task, but it would be even more forbidding to run headlong into creating a dictionary of the rongorongo signs. We need at least an outline map of their landscape before its features can be described.