Generate Maori subtitles for your English videos

Maori diacritics are part of the word

Maori uses marks above and below its letters that change which word it is rather than only how it sounds. Stripping them, as some older subtitle tooling and a few upload pipelines still do, produces text that is wrong rather than merely plain.

Open the exported file once and confirm the marks survived before you rely on a workflow. If they did not, the problem is almost always an encoding setting rather than the Maori text itself.

How English audio becomes Maori subtitles

Audio in English (English) is transcribed first, then translated into Maori (Te Reo Māori). Because the translation runs on the transcript rather than on the audio, the Maori subtitle file keeps the timings of the original English speech — each line appears at the moment it was actually said.

Why translate English video into Maori

English is spoken principally in worldwide; Maori in New Zealand. A Maori subtitle track is what lets one recording reach both audiences without re-recording, re-editing or dubbing it.

Because subtitles are a separate file rather than part of the picture, you can attach several language tracks to the same video and let viewers pick.

About the English audio

English has a wider spread of accents than any other language here, and the gap between spelling and pronunciation means recognition leans on context rather than sound alone. Names and technical terms are where errors concentrate, because those are exactly the words context cannot predict.

About the Maori subtitles

Māori uses a small set of sounds and marks long vowels with a macron, which changes the word rather than merely its length — dropping the macron produces a different word. English is mixed into most contemporary speech, and is transcribed as spoken.

What an English to Maori subtitle file looks like

Four lines of English speech, transcribed and translated, as they come out of the exported SRT. The timings are the English speaker's — translation does not move them, which is why the file drops onto the original video unchanged.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
Me tīmata tātou ki te pātai tuatahi.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Kei te rongo mārama koutou i ahau?

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Ka tuari au i ngā taipitopito ā tōna wā.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Ka kite anō i te wā e heke mai nei.

What to check before publishing

• Names and places, which translation handles less reliably than ordinary prose.
• Idiom — a phrase that is natural in English may need loosening to read well in Maori.
• That Maori diacritics survived the export — they change the word, not just its pronunciation.
• Timing on fast exchanges, where two speakers overlap.