Story Spotlight (Volume II): How Not To Translate

This is the last Story Spotlight from Whakataukī Among the Stars, Volume II, which feels fitting for a story so deeply concerned with what survives when so much else has been broken.

If you’ve enjoyed these glimpses into the world of the book and would like to read the full stories — or sink into the others waiting between the covers — you can find Whakataukī Among the Stars on my Amazon page.

Every story in Whakataukī Among the Stars, Volume II begins with an old truth and then asks what happens when people meet it in the wild, usually under pressure and often with less grace than they imagined they’d bring.

“How Not To Translate” begins in a wreck.

Set in the shattered remains of a crashed human ship in the Basin of Kūkupa, this story brings together two survivors of very different kinds: Esh, an alien field linguist and Listener, and Turi, a human pilot trapped in the wreck, injured, frightened, and very much not interested in being found by the people chasing him.

They do not share a language.

They do not share assumptions.

They do not even share the same habits of silence and speech.

And yet, through patience, gesture, humour, trust, and the difficult discipline of truly listening, they begin to build something more valuable than translation software: understanding.

The Whakataukī: ‘ā te whakarongo, ka mōhio, mā te mōhio, ka mārama, mā te mārama, ka matau, mā te matau, ka ora.’

Translation: By listening, you come to know; by knowing, you come to understand; by understanding, you become wise/learned; by being wise/learned, you will thrive.

This whakataukī is the spine of the entire story. It lays out a progression that modern life is often far too impatient to honour. First, you listen. Then you know. Then you understand. Then you become wise. Then, and only then, do you truly live well.

Not speak first. Not assume first. Not rush to categorise, manage, dominate, or explain everything into a shape that flatters your own intelligence. Listen first.

There’s a reason that sequence matters.

Because without listening, knowledge is shallow. Without understanding, cleverness becomes dangerous. And without wisdom, survival itself can become just another form of noise.

This story gets that with uncommon grace.

 What the Story Explores

At one level, “How Not To Translate” is a survival story. There is wreckage, injury, bad weather, thin margins, and the constant threat of being discovered by the wrong people. It is tense, strange, and beautifully physical in its details.

But beneath that, this is really a story about how meaning is made between people who cannot rely on fluency.

Esh begins in uncertainty. Turi begins in pain. They have only fragments: gesture, tone, objects, rhythm, expression. They misunderstand each other. They get things wrong. They have to stop, adjust, watch more carefully, strip their communication back to what actually matters.

That is where the story becomes quietly profound.

Because translation here is not treated as a tidy exchange of equivalent words. It is relational. Ethical. Emotional. It requires humility. It requires slowness. It requires letting the other person remain fully real rather than forcing them into the nearest familiar category.

That is much harder than vocabulary work, and far more important.

The story also handles trauma beautifully. Turi talks too much, jokes too quickly, fills silence because silence has not always been safe for him. Esh, by contrast, comes from a culture where listening is respect, where pauses carry care rather than threat. Neither is wrong. Neither is complete. They have to learn one another’s wounds as much as one another’s words.

That’s where the real translation happens.

 Why It Belongs in Volume II

Volume II is deeply interested in consequence, pressure, and the choices that reveal character.

“How Not To Translate” fits that perfectly because it is built almost entirely from the consequences of how people respond to one another under strain.

Do they assume, or do they ask?

Do they command, or do they listen?

Do they reduce a person to category, designation, property, registry — all those sterile little words power loves — or do they grant them the dignity of selfhood?

That question sharpens when the corporate ship enters the picture. Suddenly the contrast becomes explicit. Esh and Turi have built trust through patience, uncertainty, and shared vulnerability. The corporate voice arrives speaking the language of entitlement and retrieval. It wants classification before compassion. Identity verification before asylum. Order before humanity.

Which is, of course, how institutions so often announce they are about to behave monstrously.

The story knows this. Better still, it does not rant about it. It simply lets the moral contrast stand there in the open, plain as weather.

Listening saves life.

Refusal to listen endangers it.

The proverb could hardly ask for a cleaner demonstration.

 A Story with Quiet Humour and Deep Humanity

This one is not flashy funny. It is subtler than that, which suits it. The humour grows out of character and discomfort and the absurdity of trying to construct a shared language while injured inside a wreck on a planet that would really prefer everyone involved made their poor decisions elsewhere.

Turi’s use of humour as a survival mechanism is especially well handled. He jokes because jokes keep fear from swallowing the room whole. Esh notices tone before words. They gradually come to understand that humour, too, is a kind of translation — a way of saying I am still here, and I am trying not to break in front of you.

That feels very true.

And Esh is a wonderful counterpoint: observant, careful, precise, compassionate, and increasingly changed by the encounter. There is something deeply moving in watching a listener realise that listening itself can be a form of shelter.

 Why I Love This One

That is what I love most about “How Not To Translate.” It takes an old truth, strips away fluency, certainty, and pride, and leaves two people with the one thing that matters most at the beginning of understanding:

the willingness to listen.

Not to reply faster.

Not to win.

Not to force meaning into a shape that flatters the speaker.

Just to listen long enough for wisdom to arrive.

And in a future that will no doubt remain crowded with noise, that feels like a truth worth holding onto.

If you’d like to read the complete story — and the others that live alongside it in Whakataukī Among the Stars, Volume II — you can visit my Amazon page and step into the whole book there.

Buy on Amazon

 — Rebecca