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Machine translation is available to anyone, but real applications are just a fraction of the value the technology provides. Microsoft is working with the New Zealand government to add Maori to make machine translation more useful.
Te reo Māori is the language spoken by the Maori, New Zealand’s largest native. However, as everywhere, the language can be gradually forgotten as Māori assimilate into the dominant colonial culture for generations.
The Māori make up 15% of the population, but only a quarter speak Māori. Only 3% of New Zealand’s population. New Zealand authorities are pushing for widespread Māori education to reverse this trend and take steps to ensure adequate conservation.
Microsoft and the New Zealand Maori Committee (Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori) have been working together for several years to ensure that their software includes a disappearing language. As part of this, it is trying to introduce a Maori language into Microsoft’s translation service. Support for this service allows automatic translation between 60 other languages and Maori.
Automatic translation can be a powerful force in education as well as helping understanding and exploring the language that was buried. Creating an accurate translation model is difficult for any language. The key is to prepare lots of corpuses to compare with. Therefore, the committee gathers corpuses important for development and performs quality checks to ensure correct translation. However, for a small number of people who know the language, this is much more difficult than creating a French or German translation service.
One expert said that the development of the Maori tool would not have been possible without the efforts of countless people working towards a long-standing common goal, and hoped that the Maori language would be normalized for the future generations of New Zealand and that Maori would be recognized for its shared values around the world. It also emphasized the importance of playing a role in strengthening the reflection of technology in cultural traditions.
Countless languages are dying around the world. It may not be possible to prevent all of this, but it may be possible for technology to coexist with the current language by helping to record and use it. The Maori translation project is carried out as part of Microsoft’s AI for Cultural Heritage. Related information can be found here .
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