Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

World Wide Web in minority languages

Māori as with any other minority languages struggle to have web sites and applications available in Māori as well as English. The commercial reality outweighs the language requirements. One of the biggest issues we face are people having the language skills to complement the required technical skills.

The new Google Toolbar translates pages on the fly into a number of preset languages. Approximately 53 languages at the time of writing. So in my opinion we need to look at how such translation programs operate and duplicate it for Māori. I understand it will not be perfect but it will be understandable to the majority of Māori language speakers and it will at the same time virtually offer the World Wide Wed of millions of pages to be rendered in Māori language.

This again raises the issue that the Māori language is a living language and needs to naturally grow and without gate keepers harboring new terminology and then expecting people to purchase the right to access the new terminology. The Internet offers enough low cost deployment methods to make new terminology available to all at little or no cost.

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DISCLAIMER: This post is the personal opinion of Dr Karaitiana Taiuru and is not reflective of the opinions of any organisation that Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is a member of or associates with, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

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