Microsoft Translator Hub for Māori Language

Recent improvements in Machine Translation (MT) software has
opened new possibilities for applications of automatic language
translation. But can these opportunities exist for the smaller,
minority languages of the world? Training data was collected for
the language pair of Māori and English which was used to build
an MT system using Microsoft’s Translator Hub software. A
comparative analysis was undertaken with this system and
Google Translate. Various MT metrics and analysis software was
considered before deciding to use the Asiya toolkit to undertake
the comparative analysis. Māori language experts were also used
to provide a human perspective on the output translations. The
overall results showed no significant difference in the translation
quality produced by the two systems. Despite some misgivings
around the accuracy of the translations these results do show
promise for MT usage by minority languages.