National Weather Service Stops Translating Products Into Other Languages

iluvatar5150 said:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/weather/warning-translation-noaa-nws-cuts

The weather service has “paused” the translations because its contract with the provider has lapsed, NWS spokesperson Michael Musher said. He declined further comment.​

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Lilt, an artificial intelligence company, began providing translations in late 2023, replacing manual translations that the weather service had said were labor-intensive and not sustainable.​

Oh well, what’s a few more dead brown people?

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Right, it's not like we will help after the hurricane destroys their country, why let them know in the first place. If they want to know about there impending death, they can learn to speak American.

What motivates an administration to intentionally endanger the lives of others duriing a national weather related disaster?

Spanish is the original European language of much of this country. Its not that other.

wing2000 said:

What motivates an administration to intentionally endanger the lives of others duriing a national weather related disaster?

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I would assume it's the "budget slashing" endeavors they've been on... not so much that they're "trying to get non-English speakers killed in a tornado"


Honest question: Given that the mechanism by which people would typically receive these alerts is via their phone, and just about every phone ships with a built-in weather app that uses the NWS system as its underlying datasource (and just repackages it for their own interface), and will already display the information (including the alerts) in whatever language the person specifies when configuring their phone. Does anyone see any redundancy issues there?

I know that the NWS has certain "specialized zone" forecasts that don't flow through to some of the built-in apps (like specialized forecasts for aviation and marine zones)...but obviously those are the kinds of concerns people are expressing here.


The languages they were translating to were:
Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Samoan

How were the speakers of Italian, Russian, German, Japanese, and Arabic getting by since 2023?