Witi Ihimaera as Translator: Reading The Whale Rider as Indigenous-led Translation

This contribution focuses on the writer Witi Ihimaera as translator.It discusses the translation strategies employed in "The Whale Rider" (1987) as well as other writings and argues that translating is the process of continuously mending relations.A reading of Ihimaera's more recently published short-story "Der Traum" (2022) reveals a vision of Māori-German cooperation different from the one depicted in the film adaptation by Niki Caro (2002).Ihimaera's storytelling is a problem-constructing policy-making, "requiring attention to content and performance, to technical analysis and political articulation" (Fischer and Forester 1993, 6).A technical analysis of how translations of "The Whale Rider" for the European market continued or discontinued Ihimaera's practice of problem construction leads toward the closing thought of this chapter, namely that decolonial political articulation requires that we allow translation to unfold into plurivocal reciprocity.