English Translation
I would like to become a poet.
The sentence “ni li pona tawa mi: mi kama jan pi toki pilin” can be translated as “This is good to me: I become a person of feel-speech.”
“ni li pona tawa mi” literally translates as “this is good to me”. “Ni” means “this”, “li” is a grammatical particle used to separate the subject (in this case, “ni”) from the predicate (“pona tawa mi”), “pona” means “good” and “tawa” means “to”, making “pona tawa mi” mean “good to me”.
The next part, “mi kama jan pi toki pilin”, translates as “I become a person of feel-speech”. “Mi” is the first person singular pronoun “I”, “kama” denotes change or process, roughly equivalent to the English “become”. “Jan” means “person”, “pi” is a particle that combines or groups the following words together, “toki” means “language”, “speech” or “talk”, and “pilin” refers to emotions, feelings, or heart. “Jan pi toki pilin” then means “person of emotional speech/language”.
In summary, this sentence can be translated as “I feel good about becoming a person who speaks emotionally / from the heart”. Note that translations to and from Toki Pona can be quite loose or flexible due to its minimalist focus.