Fa’alogo Mai!
Are you an audiobook listener? We are excited to announce that audiobooks are coming to Tala Samoa. Starting with children’s books and then expanding to poetry and novels, audiobooks are a vital way to make our stories more accessible and available to a much wider audience. We started this week with founder Lani Young’s children’s book HALU BONGO. Working with Wayfarer Studio Productions was an amazing learning experience, with Lani able to narrate her own book in both English and Samoan. We can’t wait for you to hear the final product. This is going to be a great resource for use in the classroom and also for parents wanting to encourage their children’s confidence and enjoyment of our Gagana Samoa.
The next step is to help connect Tala Samoa authors with audiobook production experts and share the pathways they can use to make audio versions of their books. Just like with all the books and paintings that we promote here on Tala Samoa, we discourage the use of AI to create art and this applies to audiobooks. Part of our mission is to help support Samoan and Pasifika artists with pathways for earning an income with their art and that goes for audio/music producers too. While we know there are AI tools for quick and cheap conversion, it’s important to us that we use human narrators and creatives from Oceania to read and produce our audiobooks, especially for the bilingual stories on Tala Samoa. And an AI voice can’t adequately capture the pronunciation of our Gagana or convey our stories with the heart and soul that make them so unique.
Narrating an audiobook takes a LOT of hours, a LOT of reading and then a LOT of editing and fixing up the final audio file. Which is why we will tackle the children’s books first! As we look to the novels next, tell us what novel by a Samoan author do YOU most want the audiobook for?