The update allows visitors to click on highlighted te reo Māori words in the website content to see a simple English translation and hear the correct pronunciation.
Research and insight had highlighted that visitors to the site, both international and domestic, enjoyed te reo as part of the site experience. However, existing translation conventions were limited and not appealing as they did not adapt to a visitor's knowledge of the language and support learning new vocabulary.
We had been working on a simple and intuitive way to make translations responsive and engaging for visitors new to te reo as well as for those who wanted to build on their existing vocabulary.
Our team and the WellingtonNZ team worked with Te Aka Māori-English, English-Māori Dictionary, Māpuna Consultants to integrate the Māori Dictionary into the site.
Early on, the team conceived a solution that could utilise existing language resources and be implemented simply site-wide with little effort. There was also a desire to share the solution with other sites and organisations and share it with the open-source community.
The new experience has proven very successful with visitors, and WellingtonNZ.com is updating all content across its sites to make the most of the new capability.
The translation capability has been developed for Silverstripe, a New Zealand digital content management system.
It has been made available as open-source so that any sites using Silverstripe – including many government organisations and other regional tourism organisations – can also use the tool.
The open-source module provides an interface to associate translatable words, within a content area, with an audio description and optional text definition. The module ships with the necessary interfaces for translating te reo Maori words and expressions via the Maori Dictionary API.
—
Client: WellingtonNZ.com
Project: Te Reo kupu update
Deliverable: Platform update
Timeline: 2021