LiC: Aha'i Olelo Ola

For my LiC event, I decided to watch an episode of Aha'i Olelo Ola on KGMB. Aha'i Olelo Ola (A Messenger for a Living Language) is a a 30 minute segment of Hawaiian news in the Hawaiian language targeted for the Native Hawaiians in Oahu that is shown right before the English local news. The news anchor is Amy Kalili.

Today's news segment covered the topics of:
- Remembering Kaho'onei, a victim of diabetes. They called him the "face of Native Hawaiian diabetes"
- Makahiki festival
- Big Island, Hilo's economy
- Monk seal endangerment
- Native planting in Kapolei community
- Waipuna, Hawaiian music group

About 90% of the segment is in Hawaiian. The remaining 10% is in English. It is only in English when they are interviewing someone and that person is responding in English. During the Hawaiian speaking parts, they have English captions. And they have Hawaiian captions for English speaking parts. One thing I noticed about these captions is that the English captions changed very fast as compared to the Hawaiian captions. It was hard for me to understand what they were talking about because I couldn't read the English fast enough. This brings me to the conclusion that Aha'i Olelo Ola is aimed for a Hawaiian audience, not for English speakers. I felt that they included the English "just because". At first, I thought it was for educating Hawaiian speakers to learn English and English speakers to learn Hawaiian, but the captions were just too fast to be learning-effective. Instead, it actually confused you. There seemed to be no transition between English and Hawaiian. One minute you're reading the captions and the next you're listening to it. It was hard to follow what the news story was about. It also seemed like the English caption translations were much shorter than what was said in Hawaiian.

Another difference I noted was the news coverage. The stories they cover on Aha'i Olelo Ola are more geared towards Hawaiian culture. These news stories aren't usually covered in the English segments. I originally thought it was the same stuff that is shown on an English segment, just translated in Hawaiian, but it wasn't. There are no coverage on weather forecasts, news breaking stories, events that happened that day, sports, etc. It just shows what topics are important to Native Hawaiians. The stories seemed to be like a short documentary style because it seemed like they would talk about the history/background of the subjects more so than they would talk about the topic itself.
During commercial breaks, I noticed that the commercials were again more for the support of Hawaiian culture and language. They promoted Hawaiian Talk Radio, Kamehameha School, and Aha Punana Leo school (school that is dedicated to reviving the Hawaiian language). And these commercials played over and over for each commercial break. They didn't have any of the normal commercials we see on TV.

While watching this, I tried to see if I could catch some Hawaiian words I could understand. It was easier to read the captions in Hawaiian than trying to learn while listening because the speech was very fast. Some words I caught were: kuleana, kokua, makemake, malama, mele, kumu, maika'i. One interesting thing I noticed is the similarity between the English and Hawaiian word for "seal" is "sila".

Watching a segment of Aha'i Olelo Ola was very interesting for me. Although I didn't understand alot of it, it actually taught me alot about the Native Hawaiians. If you get a chance, watch it on KGMB9 at 5am or 5pm. Or you could go to their website to watch short video clips.