Organizations Across Hawaiʻi Need More Than Translation
Across Hawaiʻi, organizations are asking important questions about how they serve the people and communities around them:
How do we recruit and retain people who feel connected to the purpose of our work?
How do we build stronger relationships with the communities we serve?
How do we create workplaces where people experience a genuine sense of belonging?
How do we ensure that our programs reflect Hawaiʻi rather than merely operating within it?
How do we honor ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and ʻike Hawaiʻi without reducing either one to names, slogans, ceremonies, or surface-level representation?
These are not translation questions.
They are organizational questions.
Translation may be part of the response, but replacing English words with Hawaiian ones cannot address the deeper issues organizations across Hawaiʻi are facing. Language matters, but the way an organization understands, values, and lives that language matters just as much.
That is the space The ʻŌlelo Group is growing to serve.
The work often begins before translation
When an organization approaches a Hawaiian language consultant, the request may initially appear straightforward:
Can you translate this newsletter?
Can you give this program a Hawaiian name?
Can you review the Hawaiian language in this presentation?
Can you help us incorporate more ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi into our work?
Sometimes translation is exactly what is needed. But in many cases, the request reveals a larger question beneath it.
Why does the organization want to use ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi?
What relationship does the language have to the organization’s purpose?
How will employees understand and use the language after it is introduced?
Does the organization’s practice reflect the values expressed through its Hawaiian name or messaging?
Were Native Hawaiian perspectives included while the project was being developed, or was Hawaiian language added only after the major decisions had already been made?
A translation can improve the words an organization uses. It cannot, by itself, resolve a lack of alignment between those words and the organization’s actions.
That requires a different kind of work.
Hawaiʻi is not simply the location where an organization operates
Organizations across Hawaiʻi work within a distinct historical, cultural, linguistic, and political context.
That context affects how people experience schools, businesses, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, healthcare systems, visitor-facing industries, and community institutions. It influences public trust, employee relationships, organizational identity, community engagement, and the way decisions are understood.
An organization may be physically located in Hawaiʻi without meaningfully understanding the place and people it serves.
That disconnect can appear in many ways: programs created without community input, Hawaiian names disconnected from organizational practice, public messages that use cultural language without cultural understanding, or workplace initiatives that recognize diversity while overlooking Hawaiʻi’s own history and Indigenous context.
These challenges are not solved by adding more Hawaiian words to an existing structure.
They require organizations to examine how place, history, language, relationships, and responsibility inform the work itself.
Hawaiian language should help shape the work
ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi should not be treated as a layer placed over an otherwise completed project.
When engaged meaningfully, language can help an organization clarify its purpose, examine its relationships, and reconsider how it communicates and operates. Hawaiian concepts may invite deeper questions about responsibility, reciprocity, collective well-being, leadership, place, and the relationships that sustain the work.
However, those concepts should not be adopted simply because they sound meaningful.
If an organization uses a Hawaiian value to describe itself, that value should be visible in its decisions and practices. If a program receives a Hawaiian name, the people responsible for that program should understand what the name communicates. If an organization says that pilina is central to its work, for example, it should be able to explain how relationships are built, maintained, and repaired within the organization and with the community.
The question is not only whether the Hawaiian language is correct.
The larger question is whether the organization is prepared to live into what that language asks of it.
The real issues are organizational
Across sectors, organizations are navigating challenges such as:
Building public and community trust
Recruiting and retaining employees
Creating stronger workplace cultures
Developing culturally responsive programs and services
Engaging Native Hawaiian communities meaningfully
Strengthening communication across different audiences
Connecting organizational values to everyday practice
Understanding what it means to operate responsibly in Hawaiʻi
These issues do not belong only to cultural offices or Native Hawaiian-serving organizations. They affect state agencies, schools, businesses, nonprofits, healthcare providers, developers, visitor-industry organizations, and institutions of every size.
The ʻŌlelo Group cannot provide a single solution to every organizational challenge. What we can provide is a culturally and linguistically grounded lens through which organizations can understand those challenges more clearly.
That may involve reviewing an organization’s language and messaging. It may involve helping a team examine whether its stated values align with its practices. It may involve developing learning experiences, strengthening community engagement, supporting culturally grounded content, or helping leaders ask better questions before a major initiative moves forward.
In this work, translation becomes one tool within a much broader process of organizational learning and change.
From cultural visibility to institutional responsibility
Many organizations have become more interested in demonstrating a connection to Hawaiʻi. That growing interest can create meaningful opportunities, but it also carries responsibility.
Cultural visibility is not the same as cultural grounding.
An organization can display Hawaiian words throughout its workplace and still lack meaningful relationships with Native Hawaiian communities. It can open meetings with an oli and still make decisions that contradict the values expressed through that practice. It can adopt a Hawaiian name without ensuring that employees understand its meaning or that organizational behavior reflects it.
The goal should not be to appear more Hawaiian.
The goal should be to operate with a deeper understanding of the place, history, people, and relationships that make the organization’s work possible.
That shift requires more than a finished translation. It may require sustained learning, honest reflection, relationship building, changes in practice, and a willingness to receive guidance before—not after—the work has already been completed.
A different kind of partner for organizations across Hawaiʻi
The ʻŌlelo Group is not positioning itself simply as the place an organization contacts when it needs a newsletter translated.
We want to become a trusted partner for organizations working through the larger questions of what it means to serve and operate responsibly in Hawaiʻi.
Our work may still include translation, language review, naming, pronunciation support, curriculum development, and educational resources. Those services remain important. But they sit within a larger purpose: helping organizations understand how language, culture, place, and responsibility should inform their work.
That means helping organizations move:
From adding Hawaiian language at the end to involving cultural and linguistic expertise from the beginning
From using Hawaiian values as statements to reflecting them in practice
From seeking cultural visibility to building institutional responsibility
From asking only, “What is the Hawaiian word for this?” to asking, “What are we truly trying to accomplish, and are our actions aligned with it?”
These are more difficult questions, but they are also more consequential.
The future of the work
Organizations across Hawaiʻi do not need Hawaiian language only for special events, public-facing campaigns, or translated communications.
They need thoughtful guidance for understanding how Hawaiʻi’s history, language, culture, and communities relate to their mission, workforce, services, and decisions.
That is where The ʻŌlelo Group is headed.
Translation will remain part of what we offer, but it will not define the full scope of who we are. We are building a Hawaiian language education, consulting, and media company prepared to support deeper organizational learning, culturally grounded strategy, and more responsible practice across Hawaiʻi.
Because the most important question is not simply whether an organization uses ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi.
It is whether the organization understands the responsibility that comes with using it—and whether that understanding changes the way it works.
