Manawatu¯ puts its online history site into te reo Ma¯ori

A commitment to te reo by Palmerston North City Council has achieved a significant milestone with a bilingual version of Council’s award-winning Manawatu¯ Heritage online store now live.

Council’s general managercommunity Debbie Duncan says with 12,000 photographs and documents available to download and share, having a bilingual site is another way of enhancing the mana of te reo by using the language to access content.

“The bilingual navigation of Manawatu¯ Heritage is another step on our language journey. It furthers our respect for te reo as an official language of Aotearoa-New Zealand, and makes sure it has the prominence it deserves.”

Translators from He Kupenga Hao i te Reo have been incorporating bilingual site instructions, navigation toggles, as well as some metadata.

“We’ve been using te reo where we can and, though it’s not feasible to do that for all 12,000 items in the digital collection, we’re choosing selected elements of the digital collection to translate. We are also encouraging people to contribute content in te reo.”

Any Manawatu¯ -related items of current and historical interest can be uploaded to the site.

“Manawatu¯ Heritage is set up to record today’s stories for tomorrow’s heritage. It’s our living history. We really want people to use it and make it their own.”

Debbie says content can be added in any language.

“We’ve such a wonderfully diverse community, and we welcome volunteers with language skills to help moderate content in these languages.”

The repository can also be browsed by map location using a Geographic Information System (GIS) to superimpose historical maps onto a modern map of the world.

A free hour-and-a-half workshop on creating and uploading content to Manawatu¯ Heritage takes place on Sunday morning September 23 from 10.30am. Spaces are limited and registration on heritage@pncc.govt.nz or 351-4100 ext 7377 is required.

manawatuheritage.pncc.govt.nz/