“I Was Going to Be Able to Do It”

“When I was at school I liked language. I wanted to become a translator. I had a scholarship to go to Canada,” recalled Mariella Kaun. But when her father passed away when she was still in high school, leaving her mother alone, Mariella quit school. She found a job at Radio Vanuatu, writing news in Bislama and translating it into French.

After five years as a journalist, Mariella decided to leave the round-the-clock media environment. She applied for a receptionist job at Vanuatu’s supreme court and worked her way up to translator and chief clerk.

Early in 1997, her brother-in-law Paul introduced Mariella and her husband, Katimal, to the Church. The missionaries’ lesson on the plan of salvation reminded Mariella of a childhood incident. When Mariella attended Catholic school, a nun had been unimpressed with her opinion that “we were spirits somewhere and the Lord chose us and put us in our mom’s belly to come to earth.” On March 7, 1997, Mariella and Katimal were baptized.

“We’ve never regretted it,” said Mariella. She explained that at the time, she and her husband were experiencing difficulties with their marriage. “When the missionaries came, I invited my husband. I saw it as a second chance. Maybe before divorcing I was to try again,” she said. “On my baptism I made a promise to the Lord[;] if he would save my marriage I would serve him all my life.”

The week after their baptism, Mariella was called to the Young Women presidency, and Katimal was called to the Young Men presidency. Mariella subsequently served as district Relief Society president and as national director of public affairs. She worked to improve the Church’s public standing in Vanuatu through humanitarian projects.

Mariella was also called to be the Church translation supervisor. From 1997 to 2005, she worked without computers, mailing typed manuscripts back and forth between Port Vila and the area office in Auckland.

When the time came to translate the Book of Mormon into Bislama, the official language of Vanuatu, a representative from Church headquarters came to Vanuatu to interview potential candidates. “The district at the time had a list of brethren recommended for the job,” said Mariella. The men all took a test to evaluate their level of English.

The following Sunday, Mariella ran into the headquarters representative at church, and he discovered she was a professional translator. “How come you weren’t on the list?” he exclaimed.

The representative asked Mariella to take the test. The day before he left Vanuatu, he met with Mariella and Katimal and told her she was a candidate to be a translator, but the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles would make the final selection. After two weeks, Mariella received a letter saying she had been chosen as translator. “I couldn’t believe it, but deep inside me I knew that yes, that was right,” she said. “I was going to be able to do it.”

The Book of Mormon was published in Bislama in 2004.

The following year, in 2005, Mariella and her team of language specialists in Vanuatu began interpreting general conference into Bislama. Because Mariella and her team interpreted so efficiently and because hearing Salt Lake City–based Church leaders in their own language was so novel, at the end of the meeting, Mariella heard some members ask, “Who taught them to speak Bislama?”