It’s Māori language week (te wiki o te reo Māori) in Aotearoa (New Zealand), and although I’m ashamed of how little I can remember, here’s a few links for anyone interested.

Wikipedia has a good entry on the language, with a bunch of outside links. There’s also a site for learning and a translating dictionary developed at my old university.

I actually worked there on a project involving sentence-level Māori translation, which apparently was a success. I left before the web interface was really stable, and these days it seems to be permanently down. (The project was far more ambitious than just translating sentences, although that’s hard enough: we were building a dialogue engine with anaphora resolution and question-answering, and the eventual aim was to use the system for teaching Māori. Last time I was in Dunedin it was still being developed, but I’ve been out of the picture for more than four years now.)

(Thanks to my mum for reminding me. I promise I’ll give it another go next time I’m living in Aotearoa.)