English to Māori translation: what Google can’t know

Google Translate does offer te reo Māori, and for getting the gist of something it can help. But an English sentence often leaves out things Māori must say: whether we includes the listener, whether you is one, two or more people, which of two words for my fits, and whether a vowel is long. No tool can read those from English, so they are where translations go wrong. For single words, use Te Aka Māori Dictionary; for anything public, permanent or official, use a translator licensed by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 10 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

Can you trust Google Translate for Māori?

For reading, roughly. If someone sends you a Māori message and you want the gist, a machine translation will usually point you in the right direction, and a mistake costs little. Writing in the other direction is different. Going from English into Māori, the tool has to make choices that the English does not give it enough to make, and it will make them silently. You get a confident sentence with no sign of which parts were guesses.

That is not a complaint about one product. It is a property of the two languages. Each section below is a choice Māori forces and English does not, shown with correct Māori from Verbavia’s course, so you can see what a translator, human or machine, has to get right. Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, the Māori Language Commission, puts the human side of it plainly in its translation guidelines: “Not all reo Māori speakers are translators. This is a specialist skill that takes training and practice.” Even the Māori word for it, whakamāori, which Te Aka gives as to translate, render in Māori, also means to interpret, explain, clarify: translating is explaining.

Where English to Māori translation goes wrong

English gives you	Māori needs to know	Example
we	two people or more, and is the listener one of them	tāua, māua, tātou, mātou
you	one person, two, or three or more	koe, kōrua, koutou
my	is the owner in control of the thing or not	tāku pukapuka ‘my book’, tōku whare ‘my house’
my brother	is the speaker a man or a woman, and is he older	tōku tungāne, tōku tuakana
a word with a long vowel	where the macrons go	wahine ‘woman’, wāhine ‘women’
I’m going tomorrow	that the English present tense here means the future	Ka haere mātou āpōpō. ‘We will go tomorrow.’
hello, Dear …	how formal, and to how many	kia ora, tēnā koe, tēnā kōrua

We: tāua, māua, tātou or mātou

English has one we. Māori has four everyday words for it, and to choose one you need two facts: how many people, and whether the person you are talking to is one of them. Te Aka Māori Dictionary gives tāua as you (one person) and I, we two, and māua as he/she and I: the same two people counted, with the listener in or out.

Māori	Meaning
Kei te haere tāua.	You and I are going.
Kei te haere māua.	The two of us are going (not you).
Kei te kai tātou.	We are all eating, you included.
Kei te kai mātou.	We are eating, without you.

Feed a tool We’re going to the beach and it has to pick one of these. The English sentence does not say whether the reader is invited, so whichever word comes out is a guess, and the four are not interchangeable. Tātou said to a room takes everyone in; mātou draws a line with the listener outside it. A wrong pick does not read as a typo. It reads as an invitation, or as leaving someone out.

You: koe, kōrua or koutou

The same count runs through you: koe for one person, kōrua for exactly two, koutou for three or more. English you carries none of that, so Thank you for coming on a card to a couple needs a translator who knows it is going to two people. Greetings change with it too: tēnā koe, tēnā kōrua, tēnā koutou. What Māori does not have is a polite and a familiar you, the way French and German do (see formal and informal you, by the numbers). The pronoun counts people; politeness lives elsewhere in the sentence. The guide to Māori greetings and email sign-offs shows the whole set in use.

My: tāku or tōku

Māori has two kinds of possession, usually called the a and o categories, and my splits accordingly. Te Aka gives tāku for when the possessor “has control of the relationship or is dominant, active or superior to what is possessed”, and tōku for when the possessor “has, or had, no control of the relationship or is subordinate, passive or inferior to what is possessed”. In practice:

Māori	Meaning	Why
tāku pukapuka	my book	You are in charge of it: a category.
tāna kurī	his dog	Pets are a category.
tōku whare	my house	You go inside it: o category.
tōku ingoa	my name	It was given to you: o category.
tōku matua	my father	He came before you: o category.
ōku mātua	my parents	Plural: drop the t.

The choice runs through every possessive in the language, your (tāu, tōu) and his or her (tāna, tōna) included. There is an honest way round it: the neutral forms taku, tō and tana, which Te Aka describes as “not governed by the a and o categories”, are ordinary correct Māori. So a translation that uses them is not wrong. One that puts a long tā or tō in the wrong place is.

Brother and sister: it depends who is speaking

My brother is two words in English and a question in Māori. Te Aka gives tungāne as brother (of a female), tuakana as elder brother (of a male), elder sister (of a female), and teina as younger brother (of a male), younger sister (of a female). So a woman’s brother is tōku tungāne, and a man’s older brother is tōku tuakana. To translate my brother you need to know who wrote the sentence and, for a man, which of the two is older. A tool given the English alone has neither. The guide to Māori family words sets out the whole system.

Macrons: a missing line changes the word

A macron marks a long vowel, and a long vowel makes a different word. Te Aka lists wahine as woman and wāhine as women, the plural form; tangata and tāngata are person and people in the same way, and keke ‘cake’ and kēkē ‘armpit’ are not related at all. When you check any translation, check the macrons as carefully as the words, and if you copy text from somewhere, make sure they survived the trip. The Māori pronunciation guide explains what they sound like.

Word order and the small words

Māori sentences usually begin with a small word that sets the time, then the verb, then whoever is doing it. The verb itself never changes.

Māori	Meaning	What to notice
Kei te kai au.	I am eating.	kei te for now; the doer comes after the verb.
I haere au ki te kura.	I went to school.	i in front marks the past.
Kua kai au.	I have eaten.	kua: it has happened, and that matters now.
Kei te inu au i te wai.	I am drinking the water.	A second i marks what is drunk.
Kei te haere a Mere.	Mere is going.	A personal name takes a.
Kāore au i te haere.	I am not going.	In the negative the pronoun moves forward.

None of this is hard once you know it, but every one of those small words is a decision, and English tense does not map onto them one to one. English says I’m going tomorrow in the present tense; a plain future in Māori takes ka, as in Ka haere mātou āpōpō. ‘We will go tomorrow.’ Māori also reaches for the passive far more often than English does, so a good translation will often turn the sentence round: I kainga te kai e rātou. is the food was eaten by them, and is a perfectly natural way to say they ate the food.

Idiom, register and words with no English match

Translation word by word fails in both directions. Kia ora is literally be well, yet it is the everyday hello and also thank you. An English idiom translated literally produces Māori words that do not carry the English meaning, and Māori has its own sayings, whakataukī, which say a great deal in a few words; these whakataukī come with their meanings and sources. Register is a choice too: the same email can open Kia ora or Tēnā koe, and close Ngā mihi or Nāku noa, nā, and the English rarely says which is wanted.

Then there are words like mana, tapu and aroha, which have no single English equivalent at all. Translating into Māori, you often should not replace them; translating out of Māori, prestige for mana leaves most of the meaning behind. Māori words with no English equivalent takes fourteen of them in turn.

The best options, and when to use each

Learn enough te reo to check it yourself: Verbavia (our own course). Free on the web, hand-written from the first word to the end of B1 across 311 lessons, with every example voiced by Papa Reo, Te Hiku Media’s native te reo voice. The pronouns, both kinds of my, the sibling words, the tense words and the macrons each have their own lessons, explained in English. Best for anyone who wants to write Māori regularly, or to know whether a translation they were given is right.
Te Aka Māori Dictionary. John C Moorfield’s Māori–English, English–Māori dictionary, free to search online, with example sentences and explanations of grammar words and key cultural concepts. It also comes as an app for iPhone and Android; the App Store listing describes an offline dictionary of over 24,000 Māori headwords with audio pronunciations, and in New Zealand it is a one-off NZ$6.99 as of October 2026. Best for single words, and for checking a word someone has given you, macrons included.
A licensed translator. Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori does not translate for the public. It is authorised under the Māori Language Act 2016 to certify translators and interpreters, and it keeps a register of those open to work, searchable by region, service and area of expertise. Its guidelines say “Quality translations are essential for public services” and recommend one of its certified translators. Cost and turnaround depend on the job and are agreed with the translator. Best for anything public, permanent or official.
Kupu. In 2018 Spark and Te Aka Māori Dictionary released Kupu, a free app that gave the Māori word for an object when you pointed a phone camera at it, and it won that year’s Supreme Māori Language Award. It names objects rather than translating sentences.
Google Translate and other machine translators. They can be useful for the gist of a Māori text you are reading. For anything you will send, print or publish, treat the output as a draft that someone who knows te reo must check against every point above.

You need	Use
To write and understand Māori yourself	A course such as Verbavia, then practice
One word, its spelling and macrons	Te Aka Māori Dictionary
The gist of a Māori message	A machine translator, with care
An email greeting or sign-off	The Māori greetings guide, checked in Te Aka
Signage, a logo, a tattoo, a plaque	A licensed translator
Official, legal or public-service documents	A licensed translator
A speech or a ceremony	A licensed interpreter or translator

The rule underneath the table: the more people will read it, and the longer it will last, the less a guess is worth. A tattoo or a sign cannot be corrected next week.

Or learn it properly

Every hard choice on this page is learnable, and most come early. The pronouns, the tense words and the two kinds of my are beginner grammar, and once you know them you can tell at a glance whether a translation counted the people or put the macrons in. How many Māori words you need sets out how far the most common words take you, and the best way to learn Māori compares the routes. Verbavia’s free te reo Māori course teaches the pronouns, possession, tenses and macrons in order, one lesson a day.