Nice to be part of the history of Aotearoa, especially when it is about culture and digital innovation!

‘Te ara’ in Māori means ‘the pathway’. Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand offers many pathways to understanding New Zealand. When complete, it will be a comprehensive guide to the country’s peoples, natural environment, history, culture, economy, institutions and society.

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(by Hon Dr Pita R Sharples; Minister of Māori Affairs)

Education, Training and Skills (excerpt)

The second area of innovation we must pursue is to ensure our educational pathways are an integral part of the infrastructural planning to chart the future forward. Indigenous peoples must be at the vanguard of a shift to a diverse, highly differentiated, high value, export-led economy, which utilizes both natural resources and technological innovation.

Last July, a young, vibrant couple calling themselves tangatawhenua.com launched Google Maori. Potaua and Nikolasa Biasiny-Tule were part of a large team which created the Maori interface to the world’s largest online search engine. Google Maori was always more than a mechanism for being able to search words and messages in te reo Maori. Read more →

From today you’ll be able to use Google in the second of New Zealand’s official languages.

Just go to the translations page on the web’s most used search page, and in the middle of the list, which goes from Afrikaans to Zulu, the Maori option will come up.

Allowing users to put different language skins on its interface is just one of the reasons Google has become the most used search engine.

Google’s ubiquity was one of the reasons Rotorua couple Nikolasa and Potaua Biasiny-Tule undertook the translation project. Read more →

Internet service provider Google is planning to extend Te Reo Maori into a new dimension through making it accessible online.

With the ressurgence of Te Reo Maori, technology is an excellent way in which the language can be developed even more.

“Tuhia te haa o te reo ki te rangi. Let the language permeate the heavens” is the catch phrase to raise the use of Maori language to new heights and with the launch of Google Maori this will be about as close as people can get to achieving that.

For Potaua Tule and wife Nikolasa this has been a long time coming. They set up their own website TangataWhenua.com as a one stop shop where they can keep in touch with each other.

Now it’s time to take the language a step further.

We are big users of Google and noticed Maori wasn’t there, Afrikans was there, Bork Bork Bork was there, Klingon was there, but where was the Maori,” says Potaua Tule.

The Information Technology industry says using modern technology can only be a winner.

“Google is increasingly the way that technology is taught in school. It’s the way things are taught for anyone teaching any kind of class,” says IT Commentator Scott Bartley.

“And for anyone teaching Maori in the class then what better way than Google in Maori as well,” he says.

Approximately 40 volunteers put their time and efforts together to get Google Maori off the ground and one year later Google America is pleased to have Maori on board.
 
Now this language which said to be thousands of years old has been given a new lease of life in the most modern way.

The language needs to be in the hands, the ears and mouths of young people keeping those old traditions live in a modern way,” says Tule.