toki! This is an ongoing project in which I am translating the names of the original 151 Pokémon into the constructed language Toki Pona. It started out as a translation exercise when I first learnt Toki Pona back in 2018 and I've been working on it (very) slowly since.

I've seen a few people online make direct translations of Pokémon names, but I wanted to treat this as if Pokémon had received an official localisation into Toki Pona, which means coming up with unique portmanteaus and wordplay for each Pokémon. For example I've translated Caterpie as "Pipaso", a combination of pipi and laso, literally meaning "green bug."

Another part of treating this as a localisation is being constrained by the Game Boy's hardware limitations. Due to limited screen space, Pokémon names can be no longer than 10 characters which isn't much of a problem in Japanese but can be a challenge when you're translating into a language with strict syllable patterns and only has 14 letters of the alphabet to work with. To make this a bit easier on myself I'm not necessarily following the correct word order for Toki Pona, as it provides a bit more freedom in translating and helps to make the names unique, even if they don't fully make sense when read as a normal Toki Pona phrase.

It should also be noted that my Toki Pona isn't great, I don't have many opportunities to speak it in my day to day life so I'm a bit out of practise. I'm also not a linguist so I'm probably doing something wrong. Chances are you can come up with better Pokémon names than what I've come up with here, and I would recommend you do so, this is a lot of fun and it'd be nice to see more Pokémon translated into Toki Pona or even other conlangs!

A few more things to note beforehand, I'd like to thank the various contributors at Bulbapedia for providing translation notes on each Pokémon's name in other languages, and thanks also to lots of people at the Spriters Resource for ripping the sprites I've used on the pages.

And lastly, if you've arrived on this page and don't know what Toki Pona is, basically it's a constructed language that has fewer words than the original number of Pokémon. This makes translating things challenging, but fun! I'd recommend this video by jan Misali for more info.