Generate subtitles for your Maori videos

About Maori transcription

Maori (Te Reo Māori) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in New Zealand. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Maori, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

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 a Maori subtitle file looks like

Four lines as they come out of the exported SRT, in the Latin alphabet with the timings taken from the speech itself.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
Mōrena koutou katoa.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Me tīmata tātou ki te pātai tuatahi.

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
Tuhia ā koutou pātai ki raro nei.

Maori diacritics are not optional

The marks above and below Maori letters change which word it is, not merely how it sounds. Stripping them — which some older subtitle tooling still does on upload — produces text that is wrong rather than plain.

Open an exported file once to confirm they survived before you trust a workflow with a batch. When they do not, the cause is almost always an encoding setting.

Getting a better Maori transcript

• Set the language to Maori rather than leaving detection on, particularly for clips under a minute where there is little audio to judge from.
• Upload the highest-quality audio you have; compression artefacts cost more accuracy than most people expect.
• Check proper nouns, place names and numbers first — recognition errors concentrate there.
• Read the transcript before exporting. Maori subtitles are editable up until you download them.

Maori subtitles in another language

The same Maori audio can produce subtitles in any of the 76 supported languages instead of in Maori itself. English is the most common target, but every pair works, and the translated file keeps the original timings so it drops onto the same video unchanged.