• After witnessing the continued decrease of involvement in the SpotterNetwork staff in serving SN members with troubleshooting issues recently, I have unilaterally decided to terminate the relationship between SpotterNetwork's support and Stormtrack. I have witnessed multiple users unable to receive support weeks after initiating help threads on the forum. I find this lack of response from SpotterNetwork officials disappointing and a failure to hold up their end of the agreement that was made years ago, before I took over management of this site. In my opinion, having Stormtrack users sit and wait for so long to receive help on SpotterNetwork issues on the Stormtrack forums reflects poorly not only on SpotterNetwork, but on Stormtrack and (by association) me as well. Since the issue has not been satisfactorily addressed, I no longer wish for the Stormtrack forum to be associated with SpotterNetwork.

    I apologize to those who continue to have issues with the service and continue to see their issues left unaddressed. Please understand that the connection between ST and SN was put in place long before I had any say over it. But now that I am the "captain of this ship," it is within my right (nay, duty) to make adjustments as I see necessary. Ending this relationship is such an adjustment.

    For those who continue to need help, I recommend navigating a web browswer to SpotterNetwork's About page, and seeking the individuals listed on that page for all further inquiries about SpotterNetwork.

    From this moment forward, the SpotterNetwork sub-forum has been hidden/deleted and there will be no assurance that any SpotterNetwork issues brought up in any of Stormtrack's other sub-forums will be addressed. Do not rely on Stormtrack for help with SpotterNetwork issues.

    Sincerely, Jeff D.

NWS Contract for Translation Services Expires

Randy Jennings

Supporter
Joined
May 18, 2013
Messages
833
The National Weather Service has paused automated services that provide severe weather alerts in languages other than English after the government contract for those services expired. Lots of news stories. One of the more detailed ones: National Weather Service pauses severe weather alerts in Spanish and other languages

The contract expired on 3/31, but as I was chasing on 4/4, I know NWS FWD was still tweeting in both English and Spanish. I don't know if that was manual or if their is another system/contract that does that.
 
Tal vez el NWS está utilizando el Traductor de Google?
Possibly, but FWD does have some bilingual Mets also. However, using Google Translate and posting it's output would likely be a manual process. Given the speed at which both English and Spanish tweets come out at after a warning issuance, I suspect the process is automated in some way, although I have no idea if the contract that was not renewed has anything to do with that or not - I suspect not. The contract in question may be just for the "experimental" translation products page. Although the PBS story I posted seemed to imply that some folks got WEA alerts in Spanish and it implied that would not happen after this contract expired. It is really hard to tell what impact this contract non-renewal has.

As a side note, Nestor Flecha from NBC DFW 5 / Telemundo 39 spoke at TESSA a few years back and he mentioned that literal transitions of NWS warnings are confusing to Spanish speakers and he gave some interesting examples (I forget the details). He also had interesting stories about chasing a hurricane in the NBC mobile X-band radar truck and why I doesn't really work out for severe and hurricane chasing and why it was sent to the northeast to chase snow instead.
 
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