In this paper we present our research over machine translation for Maori to English language pairs. The aim of this research is to create a lookup table for Maori-English words or phrases that are extracted from a set of aligned sentences. A major problem in this domain is word/phrase alignment. To overcome this problem, some common approaches have been investigated including statistical analyzing as well as heuristic methods. Although the research is in its initial steps and needs more parallel data, the initial results show that we can rely on statistical approaches to create Maori-English machine translation.