Ian Cormack: a career found in English-Māori translation
With a career spanning six decades, Ian Cormack has worked as a teacher, marriage counsellor, lecturer, inspector, author, editor and translator and has spent the overwhelming majority of his long career championing te reo Māori. Now aged 74 he remains as busy and as passionate as ever about advancing the standing of te reo Māori and helping others grow through the language.
Cormack arrives at the Language Learning Centre accompanied by his friend and former student George Konia as well as Marty King, Kaiārahi Rautaki and Kairauhi (Māori Subject Librarian) respectively at Victoria University’s Kelburn Library. Methodical and meticulously prepared, Cormack opens his folder of notes and sets it out on the table in front of the audience. It is obvious that he is not someone who does things by halves. Cormack starts his story.
A love for languages and teaching | Kohara mō ngā reo me te whakaakoranga
Attending university in the 1960s, he read both French and Russian. On graduating in 1968, he took a job at Wanganui High School, working as a French teacher, since there were literally only a couple of schools offering Russian in the whole of New Zealand. In 1971, he moved to the far north town of Kawakawa, where he continued to teach French. Despite having spent years learning the intricacies of these two European languages, with around 70 per cent of his students of Māori heritage, it soon turned out that there was a great desire to learn te reo Māori within the school and local community. Cormack started to learn Māori in earnest. In 1971 he and his wife sat the then School Certificate examination in te reo Māori along with five of his students. Due to the obvious need for a Māori teacher in the school, and recognising his enthusiasm and growing interest, visiting Department of Education inspectors asked him to teach Māori. Having grown up in a Pākehā family in Canterbury and Otago it was with some apprehension, as well as great humility, that he agreed to do so, learning as he went. With the understanding of the district’s 12 marae that he would just undertake the task of teaching the area’s students Māori until they could find a suitably qualified teacher, he began. Unbeknown to him, this would take 10 years.
In tandem with growing recognition of the rightful place of Māori culture and its renaissance in the public life of Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori life started to develop throughout the school. The language was just one area of growth for the culture within the school. Kapa haka was becoming ever more popular and, under the instruction of a local Ngā Puhi craftsman, students started carving. Female students were as keen as their male counterparts and this started to push the boundaries of this locally male-dominated tradition.
Right at the beginning of his career teaching te reo Māori, Cormack found that there was no ideal student-centred textbook so, using a French textbook as a model, he created his own course for teaching te reo Māori. Over many years of using it in the classroom he gradually refined the method. Later on, eager to share it with others, he eventually published it in the form of the textbooks Te Mātāpuna, Te Pūkaki and Te Awa Rere with the United States publisher Cengage Learning. He reminisces about some of his classes: for example he had one young male student who could just never sit still and focus except when he was playing his guitar. Cormack was ever receptive to finding new ways of working with his students, so he let the boy gently strum his guitar at the back of the classroom and somehow everyone managed to learn better.
Always seeking development | Whakawhanake i ngā wā katoa
In the next phase of his life he and his wife Shirley moved to be closer to family in his wife’s hometown of Whanganui. Looking for a new challenge and again keen to help others, Cormack also trained and started practising as a marriage counsellor. This work, and his learning on neuro-linguistic programming, greatly influenced his thinking and he credits it with helping him develop as a teacher too. Eager to reach out to his students, he moved away from the traditional emphasis on the written word to place a greater emphasis on auditory as well as tactile learning. During the 1980s, he was also keen to keep upskilling and elevate his own level of Māori. He continued his learning journey by studying through the Te Ataarangi method that championed a hands-on approach using Cuisenaire rods, also known as rākau. He vividly recalls being perceived as Pākehā when he turned up to the first session, and the teacher thrusting some rods into his hands and him nervously arranging them as instructed as a 100 pairs of eyes looked on. He was not only accepted and welcomed, but persevered with the night class and made great progress.
Teaching teachers | Whakaako i ngā kaiako
By 1987, the need for teachers of te reo Māori was fast becoming acute. At the same time Cormack was becoming well-known as much as for his commitment to pedagogical innovation as for his facility in the language, and was headhunted by Palmerston North’s College of Education to take native speakers of Māori and, within a year, equip them with the skills they needed to teach primary or secondary school students. It was during this time that he met his now friend of over 30 years, George Konia. It was a challenging feat, for both students and teachers, with both growing along the way.
A deeper connection | Herenga whakapapa
Around this time he began to research his own family background. Although he had grown up in an exclusively Pākehā world in the South Island, in the back of his mind he had always had some inkling that he also had some Māori roots. He sent a letter to a long-lost uncle, a kaumātua in the Southland town of Tuatapere, asking what he knew. This uncle wrote back with 25 pages detailing Cormack’s whakapapa. Discovering that he had personal connection to Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Māmoe was important for his own sense of belonging as an increasingly active proponent of te reo Māori.
Branching out | Ngā ara rerekē
When the Government launched the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms in 1989, Cormack was sought by the Educational Review Office (ERO) to appraise and review kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa in the Taranaki-Whanganui region. He was accompanied by two kuia as much as for his own safety as to lend this apparently white man some mana. From his description it is obvious he was ever cognisant of the need to be humble and gently help the schools improve their work and meet the ministry’s standards. In alignment with the spirit of immersion education, Cormack produced all reports and correspondence for these client schools in te reo Māori. At that time there was considerable pushback towards biculturalism from the established news media, which were often happy to feed populist anti-Māori sentiment. Cormack’s work was sometimes subject to media requests under the Official Information Act, and so he gladly released the original documents. When the newspapers called back complaining they couldn’t read it, he suggested that they hire someone who could read it, as Māori is an official language of New Zealand. This stalling usually allowed the growing immersion movement some space as it bought them enough time for interest in the issue at hand to fade.
As he became renowned for his work in the region, he increasingly attracted attention in Wellington, which led him to be appointed as ERO’s national advisor on te reo Māori. After a couple of years doing this, he was again yearning for closer engagement with the language itself. After an already lengthy career honing his abilities in te reo Māori, in 1994 he prepared for and successfully passed the Māori Language Commission’s gruelling examination that provides accreditation for professional translators and interpreters of English and Māori.
Contribution to te reo Māori pedagogy | Tāpaetanga ki te whakaakoranga o te reo Māori
As well as doing translation work, Cormack collaborated again with Cengage Learning to produce a new, more modern textbook series. The names of the first two volumes Te Hikuwai (source of a stream) and Te Wahapū (river mouth) are aimed at students taking NCEA Levels 1 and 2 respectively. The books are colourful and appealing and, unusually for Māori learning materials, draw on Cormack’s own myriad experiences learning not just Māori, but also Greek, Italian, German, Mandarin, French and Russian. Replete with audio recordings, they include vocabulary for today’s student and feature natural dialogues about everyday things and situations. If you look through the books, you notice the clear grammatical explanations are logically backed up with practice exercises. Importantly, the books include answers and accurate transcripts that make the books amongst the very best of any available for the language. Incredibly the third volume, which aims to bring students up to the NCEA Level 3, has not yet been published due to lack of demand. Cormack laughs as he muses that nobody writes textbooks to get rich. Still, these two books are a valuable contribution to the field as there is still a limited choice of textbooks for those learning Māori. Hopefully, as the language regains its status in New Zealand, this third volume will go to print too.
Found in translation | Kitea kei roto i te whakamāoritanga
Today Cormack and his wife run Taumatua Māori Language Services Limited producing translations and editing for a range of clients. Given the small number of people accredited as professional translators of te reo Māori, it is common for them to translate not just into their native language but also into their second language (English to Māori and Māori to English). It’s obvious that he loves the work. He mentioned the huge changes that have been necessary to bring the Māori language up to speed in terms of modern technology and the age of the computer. A lot of the work in recent years has thus focussed on quite technical translation. As a professional translator he is completely at home with software packages that draw on a huge corpora of words. This means that his work can sometimes be sped up by drawing upon the previous translations of others’, as well as his own, work when he produces new translations.
He has worked, for example, on the Māori versions of Facebook and Microsoft Windows, and tertiary students around the country now have the option of using the Māori version of Blackboard, which he translated from the English. Translation is a business that knows no borders: the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei recently contracted him to produce the Māori version of its mobile phone operating system. It is still the only company offering a full te reo Māori mobile phone interface. He is a bit of a perfectionist, mentioning that someone else later edited it and it wasn’t really an improvement. The list of projects he has worked on is seemingly endless.
A viable career for young Kiwis | He umanga pai mō te rangatahi o muri nei
As his parting message, Cormack is very keen to mention that there is an insatiable need for English-Māori translators. He points out that the language has sustained him and offered him stimulating work for well over 40 years. He reveals that the pool of qualified translators in this area is so small that jobs he turns down (he still spends some eight to ten hours each day translating), frequently come back to him from another company after the first has exhausted all its contacts. Although it requires a lot of work to pass the Māori Language Commission’s examination, the work is rewarding for those with a linguistic bent and who have a passion for the revitalisation of te reo Māori. He recommends those who are motivated to study hard and seek out all opportunities to use the language.
Those interested in improving their te reo Māori can take courses at beginner through to advanced level through Victoria University’s Te Kawa a Māui (School of Māori Studies). Te Pūtahi Reo (Language Learning Centre) also has an extensive collection of materials for learning te reo Māori both physical and online and welcomes those seeking advice on self-study to get in touch with its staff members. Marty King, Kairauhi (Māori Subject Librarian) at the University’s Kelburn Library is also available to assist students and staff researching aspects of te reo Māori as well as tikanga Māori.
Article by Benjamin Swale