NWS Contract for Translation Services Expires

[Randy Jennings]

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.

 

[gdlewen]

Tal vez el NWS está utilizando el Traductor de Google?

 

[Randy Jennings]

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.