My Literary Art of Tok Pisin HR Translation Part 2 03/03/25

Introduction

3 days ago, I wrote My Literary Art of Tok Pisin HR Translation Part 1 28/02/25. I am halfway through the translation of HR Policies amounting to 25, 429 words. Here’s another snippet of my Translation Style Guide within which I describe the guidelines and the reasons for those guidelines.

Translation Style Guides are part of instrumental competence that all translators must possess. Instrumental competence refers to the ability to use documentation resources and technological resources in translation.

In this blog, you will read about my second guide, which is also a strategy that addresses a linguistic and textual difficulty.  Specialized texts are difficult to translate because of a list of difficulties, one of which is called linguistic and textual difficulty. Knowing the competency of a Tok Pisin translator allows you as a client to outsource your documents to a competent translator who understands vocabulary, grammar, language variation and textual features of both English and Tok Pisin.

PNG Language Services is committed to language development in PNG and is working to provide a Tok Pisin Translation Training aimed at establishing translation competence levels in written translation and provide direction for professional development. This training will be available soon. A trial version of this training will be available online for free to only 5 five people.

Guide 2. Change Passive Voice to Active Voice

Example; English sentence in passive voice and its translation in Tok Pisin;

If there is uncertainty whether something constitutes corruption…

Sapos yupela i no klia long korapsen em i wanem samting….

Rationale; A passive voice is used when the focus is on the action and not the person doing it. The current documents have a specific textual feature where texts are written in the English passive voice. Tok Pisin does not have an equivalent passive voice sentence structure and always require an actor or doer in the sentence structure, therefore such sentences need to be changed from passive voice in English to active voice in Tok Pisin.