Archive Tokipona translations by breaking down the sentences in to concepts, and reassembling them, you get to focus as much on the aesthetics as the meaning
think of what you want to say, for example:
I'm having difficulties starting to study. Social media is always there, distracting me.
The author finds an anchor where they can start translating and work
from there. From "starting to study" comes pali open, and through to pali open li ike tawa mi which they can then
choose to further refine or reconsider now that it's in the tokipona
linguistic form. pali lipu open can mean
the "start of the book work", in Pu Lesson 11 the
noun-phrasing is explained, each new word describes the sum of the
previous words.
Breaking down more complex ideas like "social media" is a bit
difficult and it requires a lot more imagination and heavy lifting. It's
a document- or note-based community for everyone, so the author finds
lipu kulupu ali
The construction of tokipona ends up being a fairly aesthetic adventure then, where a choice of words may differ based on the context or the intent, and lets you grapple with some of the interesting paradoxes of how we think:
And distracting me could be “good for me”, or “pona tawa mi”? It would make a kind of poetic sense: I am bad at this because that is good for me…
pali lipu open li ike tawa mi
tan lipu kulupu ali pona tawa mi.
tenpo lili.
while this reads nicely and looks okay as text, it's really something
which benefits from reading in the hieroglyphic which tokipona "ships
with". The author points out kindly that the glyphs and the fonts which
render them are meant to be able to combine glpyhs to show grouped
meaning which the textual reading may not be able to convey; things like
tawa mi looking like a walking person or
lipu encasing the concept the document
carries… it's good stuff