Le Gordon Wells
Tongan is the latest addition to our Other Tongues initiative, with our documentary about catching razorfish in South Uist now realised in yet another island language – this time from the South Pacific! We’re very grateful to Rev. Tevita Holani for giving new life to this popular early film, first translating the narration into his own mother tongue, and then recording this beautifully clear and measured voiceover.
And we’re equally delighted to record another first for Clilstore by adding Tongan to the long list of languages for which the platform now caters. You can read the full transcript while watching the embedded video here: https://multidict.net/cs/12779. YouTube subtitles are also enabled in Tongan, with auto-translation into other languages available through the settings wheel.
Tevita trained and worked as a scientist before becoming a pastor with the Uniting Church in Australia. He was born and raised in Tonga, moving to Australia and starting a family there in his adult life. (The Tongan archipelago, being not far from New Zealand, south-east of Fiji and south/south-west of Samoa, now takes Island Voices’ global reach yet further east than Okinawa and mainland Japan!) Tevita travels back to Tonga regularly to see family and friends and is a part of the large Tongan and Pacific Islander diaspora community living in Australia.
His youngest son, Amanaki Holani, a musician and sound engineer, moved to Inverness in 2025 with his partner Kirsty McKellar, a community worker and researcher who is undertaking her PhD in Gaelic studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands through the Language Sciences Institute. This is how Tevita came to know of the Island Voices project, for which he, and his wife Tine, graciously accepted the offer to create a Tongan language rendition of the Razorfish documentary from our Series 2 Outdoors collection. There you can find the original Gaelic and English versions alongside interviews with participants.
It was an interesting and collaborative process, with questions going back and forth, including how to translate ‘Razorfish’. This marine creature is nowhere to be seen off the coasts of Tonga, so finding a suitable name was part of the process. Vāsua mata-helé was found to be the closest translation.
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Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean