This article explains some of the difficulties of translating the poetry of Queen Sälote (QS) from Tongan into English. Tongan belongs to the Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. Along with Niuean, it is a daughter language of Proto-Tongic, one of the two major subgroups of Polynesian. The other subgroup is Proto-Nuclear Polynesian, to which belong all other Polynesian languages, including the Outlier Polynesian languages in Micronesia and Melanesia. The author finds two reasons for translation difficulties: structural differences between Tongan and English - examples of these are given in section 2 - and cultural differences or differences in cultural knowledge between the Tongan-speaking audience for whom the Tongan original was composed and the non-Tongan-speaking audiences for whom the translation was produced - examples of these are given in section 3. In section 4 two translated poems and their commentary are presented.