National Weather Service halts automated translation for alerts

The National Weather Service has halted its automated language translation services until further notice, potentially hindering the millions of U.S. residents who speak a language other than English from accessing lifesaving information at a time when climate change is exacerbating extreme weather events, experts say.

The pause was “due to a contract lapse” with an artificial intelligence firm providing the translation services, according to a message from the agency this month.

In October 2023, the NWS announced that its forecasters had been working with the machine learning company Lilt to train AI software on weather-related terminology in Spanish and simplified Chinese. It also went on to offer translations in Vietnamese, French and Samoan. According to a U.S. Census report, 67.8 million people in the United States spoke a language other than English at home in 2019.

At the time of the announcement, NWS Director Ken Graham said the tool would improve “service equity to traditionally underserved and vulnerable populations that have limited English proficiency” and boost “readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events.”

But such ambitions may be at odds with the Trump administration’s policy approach. It has declared English the official language of the United States – revoking a Clinton-era order that required federal agencies to provide assistance for those with limited English ability. And President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders have led National Science Foundation employees to flag research that includes words Trump may disapprove of, such as “equity” and “diversity.”

Mass terminations and sweeping cuts by the Trump administration have dramatically reshaped the federal government in recent weeks, including at the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Staffers at the agencies told the Washington Post that Trump’s overhaul would impede their ability to monitor and predict weather hazards.

The NWS and Lilt did not immediately respond to a request for comment and clarification about how long the translation pause is expected to last.

“Climate-induced disasters such as extreme storms and hurricanes disproportionately impact vulnerable people – including those who do not speak English as a first language,” Michael Méndez, an assistant professor who studies climate change policy at the University of California at Irvine, said in an email.

Those groups, he added, “are more likely to be negatively impacted by a disaster – due to language barriers and not receiving access to vital information” such as weather alerts and evacuation orders.

While the NWS had been manually translating forecasts and warnings into Spanish for decades, the AI tool allowed for more efficient, standardized translations, said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher Joseph Trujillo-Falcón, who supported the NWS’s AI translation program through social science research.

It’s not as simple as tossing an alert into Google Translate, he explained – his team and NOAA spent years training the AI to be contextually intelligent and to avoid mistakes such as translating “tornado watch” as “tornado clock.” Mistranslations “can actually cause very consequential outcomes,” Trujillo-Falcón said.

He said his team and NOAA have reduced translation times on some products from an hour to two or three minutes – time that can be crucial in a disaster.

As an example, he pointed to a tornado outbreak in 2021 that hit Mayfield, Kentucky, which has a large Spanish-speaking population. He interviewed a survivor who said they had ignored alerts in English because they could not read them, but when they received an alert in Spanish, they quickly took refuge on the first floor of their home – shortly before the second floor was wiped out.

“If they had not received that alert in Spanish, that would have most likely been a fatal outcome,” Trujillo-Falcón said.

“What truly worries me is that these events are only becoming more intense and a lot more uncertain, too, and we have to be ahead of the game in our communication efforts,” he said. “We can come from all walks of life, but I think we can all agree at least that everyone deserves to have a chance to stay safe during a big disaster.”