NWS No Longer Providing Translations of Weather Alerts

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National Weather Service no longer offers its products such as weather warnings in languages other than English.

The contract between NWS and artificial intelligence company Lilt has ended. Lilt began providing automatic translations for NWS in late 2023. When the contract lapsed, it was translating for NWS into Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Samoan.

Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, a subset of a White House IT team rather than a government department, decided not to renew the contract.

There are some places in the USA where native speakers of most or all of these languages live. If they do not also speak English, they are no longer able to get timely warnings about such events as tornadoes. The Census Bureau says nearly 68 million in the USA speak a language other than English at home.

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