Contest’s Mandarin makeover
National kapa haka competition to get Chinese translation for first time
The final of the country’s premier kapa haka competition will be translated from te reo Ma¯ori to Mandarin for the first time.
The Te Matatini kapa haka festival begins next Thursday at Wellington’s Westpac Stadium and will run for four days, leading up to the final on Sunday.
Aucklander Lidu Gong — star of the Vogel’s advertisement — will translate the event for Ma¯ori TV’s broadcast.
Gong, a Chinese national, started learning te reo about eight years ago.
He’s now fluent, but continues to study the language and, more broadly, the culture to improve his knowledge.
The 64-year-old fits this around his work as a librarian at Te Wananga o Aotearoa’s Ma¯ngere campus and his home life with his wife and daughter in Mt Roskill.
Gong started learning te reo because of his fascination with Ma¯ori culture, along with another, slightly more unusual reason. About a decade ago he began suffering from insomnia, and had started searching for a way to cure his sleeplessness.
“I was told that the best way of getting to sleep was repeating something to myself.” Having learnt Japanese and German in his late 20s, he knew learning a language was all about repetition — so decided to give te reo a go.
He soon found he loved the language, and whiling away sleepless hours with vowels and learning place names, became one of the “best parts” of his day.
He went on to involve himself in kapa haka, and, in 2013, was part of an award-winning team.
“I really like it as a way of conveying Maori identity and spirituality.”
The invitation to act as translator for the event final came as a surprise, he said, but a welcome one.
There were many similarities between Mandarin and te reo, which he hoped the audience to his translation would appreciate.
A crowd of about 60,000 is expected over the course of the event, which is returning to Wellington for the first time in 40 years.