Victoria University’s Law Faculty marked Māori Language Week (27 July to 2 August) with the launch of a new bilingual legal tool.

The Legal Māori Resource Hub (at www.legalmaori.net) allows online users to browse contemporary and historical Māori language texts, look up word meanings, and test new or old Māori words against an enormous document bank. The hub is home to three main resources:

• an online version of He Papakupu Reo Ture – a Dictionary of Māori Legal Terms;
• the legal Māori corpus comprising thousands of pages of Māori language text dating as far back as the 1830s; and
• a corpus browser which allows the user to conduct in-depth and tailored searches of the corpus texts.

This kind of co-ordinated and comprehensive search tool has not been publicly and easily available in New Zealand before.

The hub is the latest output of Te Kaupapa Reo-a-Ture (the Legal Māori Project), released in association with the New Zealand Law Foundation, Victoria’s Office of Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Māori) and staff and students at Victoria’s Law Faculty.