“At every meeting of Nga Taonga a Nga Tama Toa Trust the translators would turn up and there would be a public audience, too,” Soutar says.
“So off everyone would go. People would challenge the translators by asking questions like ‘why did you use this word, it’s not one we’ve heard?’ so the meetings were fantastic learning opportunities and there were some great debates.”
There was, for example, the issue of to-macron or not-to-macron.
Common in Maori text today, the use of the macron to show where to put emphasis on a word is a modern invention, having only been used for about 25 years.
“We had a situation where some native speakers didn’t see the point of using them, while others had sympathy for speakers of Maori as a second language who had learned the reo using macrons,” Soutar says.
“So we compromised — there are macrons in some chapters, but not in others. That way the chapters are regionally-specific.”
And the debates went on for a full five years until the translation was complete.
“We knew it would take that long as it is a job that had to be done right, but we could never have paid the translators for that time,” Soutar says.
“They were aware they would be doing it for love but, when we asked, not one of them said no.”
The Maori version of Nga Tama Toa: The Price Of Citizenship — Nga Tama Toa: He Toto Heke, He Tipare Here Ki Te Ukaipo — is, in fact, the result of a translation from Maori to English, then back to Maori.
Interviews with Maori veteransThe books, the archive and the C Company Memorial House that opened in Gisborne last year all grew from Soutar’s English translations of interviews conducted with Maori veterans and widows in the 1990s.
But while it was hoped to release the book in te reo Maori first, Soutar says there just wasn’t time.
“Back in 2008 when the first edition was published there were only about 19 C Company veterans left. They were all in their 90s and time was passing fast,” he says.
“The fact that there are only about five left today shows we were right to focus on serving them by getting the book out in their lifetimes.
“We now have what the veterans wanted in the first place — a Maori and an English version of Nga Tama Toa — and it’s also more than that . . . it’s a resource for language learners and an example of quality Maori language based on the iwi dialects of the Tairawhiti region.”
As for the content of the te reo version of Nga Tama Toa, it tells the same story as its predecessor — an account of the impact World War 2 had on the iwi of the Tairawhiti district, focusing on both the war effort overseas, and also at home.
The English version was already a winner, taking the 2009 Massey University Nga Kupu Ora Maori Book Award, being a finalist in the history category of the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and getting the New Zealand Society of Authors gong for Best First Book (Non-Fiction).
Now Nga Tama Toa in te reo has its own trophy as the supreme winner of this year’s Nga Tohu Reo Maori: Maori Language Awards.
Dr Soutar wrote the English version while a fellow in Maori History at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in 2004-2005. He returned to the Ministry in 2011 to co-ordinate the 28th Maori Battalion website, encouraging more Maori language use on the site. He is currently writing a history of Maori in World War 1 for the Ministry.
But though he has devoted more than 20 years to the C Company project and had a military background himself before academia beckoned, Soutar doesn’t believe it is a celebration of war.
“You could say it is more a commentary on the futility of war,” he says.
“You walk through the amazing C Company Memorial House and see these generations of people who have taken part in the theatres of war, and when you get to the end of it you have to ask ‘Are we doing something wrong here? Is there a better way to solve our differences?’ ”
