Found in Translation

Microsoft, M ori, and Plenty of P manawa
Most computer users have one very basic requirement: the language their
computer speaks needs to be in their own native tongue. The computer
communicates with us in the form of dialog boxes, menus, and error
messages, and most of those little messages are brought to us by a software
company that is represented on the majority of the world’s computers:
Microsoft.
It’s a company that’s been remarkably multilingual. The 2010 version of its
operating system—Windows 7—was released in thirty-six different languages.
An impressive number indeed, but is it sufficient? Well, no, not if you want to
support language communities that don’t speak one of those languages as their
primary language.
In 2001, to respond to those unmet language needs, Microsoft’s Local
Language Program began to call on communities of languages without access
to localized versions of the software to produce Language Interface Packs,

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appropriately abbreviated as LIPs, that would provide translations to the most
commonly used parts of the software (approximately 80 percent of the user
interface). For Windows 7 there are now sixty LIPs available in total. This
batch covers languages from Afrikaans to Catalan to Inuktitut to Malayalam to
Punjabi and Yorùbá.
M ori, an official language spoken in New Zealand by between 60,000 and
120,000 of the country’s native people, is one of these languages. For the M
ori LIP project, Microsoft enlisted the help of M ori language activist Dr. Te
Taka Keegan, a man with a fervent belief in the need to open up the modern
world to the ancient language of M ori.
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This conviction is deeply rooted in
history. Indeed, the M ori people—and the country of New Zealand—have
suffered long-lasting consequences as a result of outsiders “assisting” with
important language-related matters affecting their people.
Back in 1840, the British government and M ori chiefs assembled to debate
the Treaty of Waitangi, a document the leaders hoped would end years of
bloodshed and determine the future of New Zealand. The night before, the
document had been handed off to Henry Williams, a British missionary and
Bible translator, so that he could translate it from English into M ori. Helped
by his son, he rushed to get the translation completed in time. The next
morning, the treaty was read aloud in both languages. Unfortunately, it
contained an error that would change the course of history.
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In the text of the original English treaty, the M ori were asked to “cede to
Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the
rights and powers of Sovereignty.” This was translated into M ori as “ka tuku
rawa atu ki te Kuini o Ingarani ake tonu atu te Kawanatanga.” The last word of
the M ori translation (Kawanatanga) does not mean “sovereignty,” but
“governance” or “government.” The M ori leaders, hoping for the installment
of a legal system to protect them from lawless foreigners and restore order,
were ready to allow the British Crown to take over governance. But they were
not willing to sign away their sovereignty over their land. Yet that is exactly
what happened. (There has been extensive debate over whether Williams’s
error was intentional or inadvertent.)
More than 130 years later, in 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal was formed and
charged with recommending reparations to the M ori from the government of
New Zealand. But nothing could ever repair the damage done by colonization,
let alone restore the “stolen generations,” to use the words of Chief Judge J. V.
Williams.
Knowing full well the effects of these stolen generations on his culture as the
direct result of a mistranslation, Keegan is focused on the generations of the

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future—only one in six M ori under the age of fifteen can speak the language
fluently as of the 2006 census. Carla Hurd, who oversees Microsoft’s Local
Language Program, recalls conversations with children in other areas with LIP
programs: “When they told me they didn’t speak the language, and I asked
them why, they said, ‘You’re not cool with your friends if you do. I only speak
that with my grandma and grandpa.’ Social media, texting, web surfing—these
technologies are used by the younger generations. If they cannot use the
language to do what’s ‘cool,’ then the language will die.”
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A lecturer at the University of Waikato, Keegan has dedicated much of his
life to ensuring the survival of the language through technology. He previously
helped Microsoft develop the M ori keyboard (which gives easy access to the
long vowels with macrons, such as , , , or ē) and worked on various other
high-tech and open-source projects. He helped a search engine provider
localize its search interface and a translation platform into M ori, assisted with
translations of the open source e-learning platform Moodle, and managed the
project to digitize eighteen thousand legacy M ori newspaper pages. His
ground-up approach looks for the projects and resources that will have the
most impact on the M ori language and people.
The language of technology is often equated with the language of progress,
but in many languages, terms for computing do not even exist. Why would
they, if the people who speak the languages can’t use computers in those
languages? So, Keegan and his teams had to develop new terminology from
scratch, which then had to be submitted to the M ori Language Commission for
approval. For every new term, they tried to find traditional M ori words to
describe the new technological concepts. For the term software, for instance,
they used the traditional M ori term p manawa, which refers to talents and
skills, things that aren’t initially seen but become obvious when put into action.
Only when the simplicity and clarity of the language becomes clouded with
traditional terms did they revert to transliterations of the English terms in M
ori. Terms for digital unit sizes like byte, kilobyte, and megabyte were
transliterated as paita, kiropaita, and mekapaita. In other words, generations of
M ori children will have Keegan and his team’s p manawa (in the traditional
sense) to thank for the p manawa they will be able to use (in the software
sense). And this time around—unlike back in 1840—the future of the M ori
people will be defined by translations that come from within their own
community.