I am doing a High School Graduation cake for a girl who wants a "Hawaiian Theme". No problem! HOWEVER: her family wants "We are Proud of You" written in Hawaiian! ACK!

I found a website and I translated word by word and came up with: Kakou 'oli hakei ka 'oe

Anyone speak Hawaiian and can verify that I'm right/close? I don't know if anyone at the party will actually know Hawaiian, but I don't want to take a chance that I'm really off!

Thanks!!

"Gosh, parents, what a wonderful and unique idea! But since I dont' speak or write Hawaiian, you'll have to provide the correct phrasing for me. Here's my email so you can send it to me......"

Indydebi, you are the best

LOL!! I need to be quicker on my feet!! That's a great response!!! haha! That made me laugh & I needed that!

That is a good thing to remember for any language!! If you don't get it right you could be saying something not so nice.

We had workers working in our house that spoke spanish and I used one of those translation things and the stupid thing was meant to tranlate emails, so put put directions and things I wanted them to fix and I hit translate and printed it. Then I gave it to one of the workers, later on that day, the head contractor (luckily he is my husbands friend) told me that there were things about donkeys and some other stuff..ha ha ha ha ha...

There is a commercial for one of the cell phone companies that has something to the same effect. The guy mispronounces his client's name and calls him smelly fish wife or something like that. It's all in the transalation.

The safest thing to do is to put it back on the parents. Tell them to provide the exact phrase they want. You don't speak/write Hawaiian, so you don't want to make a mistake.

I just had a similar problem with a Hawaiian cake that I wanted to say "HB Dad" on in Hawaiian. I went to Yahoo asks and requested the correct spelling of the phrase and had several answers and some folks even included histories of how the phrase came to be. It was very interesting and seeing it spelled out in responses helped with special symbols that the Hawaiian language uses sometimes. The parent idea is great too!!

Here is that list of commercial slogans into foreign markets...some funny stuff! http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/slogans.html