Supporting te reo Māori

Storypark for Families app learned its first words in te reo Māori

Storypark has taken further steps towards providing more support for te reo Māori. 

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week) is 9–15 September this year, and as a New Zealand company, we wanted to show our support for te reo in Storypark. Educators have been able to write learning stories and community posts in te reo Māori for many years, with Storypark providing support for macrons. Find out how to set up your computer to type macrons here. 

For this next step, we’ve translated most of the Storypark for Families iOS app.

We’ve partnered with Māori translators to ensure the language was integrated into the app as naturally as possible. Our aim was quality rather than speed via machine translation as that resonates better with our company ethos. We’ve translated the headings and labels, any content you create will remain in the language in which it was written.

Te reo Māori phrases include ‘Ngā Kōrero’ (‘Stories’); ‘Hapori’ (‘Community’); ‘Ngohe (‘Activities’); and ‘Tipako wā pū’ (’Select moment’).

Creating the change

This change was led by a couple of our developers, Ellery and Esmé.  Both have a passion for te reo Māori and wanted to make a difference. Storypark provides our team with 10% time to work on personal development or areas of personal interest that can mutually grow Storypark and themselves. Storypark was very proud to support them with this work and helped them bring it to life by connecting them with Māori translators and ensuring it was prioritised to launch this week.

Make the change

We’d love you to consider setting the preferred language on your iPhone or iPad to te reo Māori to incorporate more of the language into your daily life. Who knows, you may even learn a few new words!

Making the change is easy. First, make sure you’ve got the latest version of the Storypark for Families app. Then follow these steps:

In the Settings on your device, go to General > Language & Region > Other Languages. Search for Māori and then select ‘Prefer Māori’.

This selection will cause any app on your device that supports te reo Māori to display in Māori, including Storypark for Families. Your phone will remain in English and can easily be rolled back if you decide it’s not for you.

We would love to support te reo Māori in our Android app as well, but can’t at the moment due to most Android phones not supporting Māori. We are monitoring this and would love to release a translation as soon as this is supported.