National Weather Service pauses Spanish translations on all products

MONTEREY BAY, Calif. (KION-TV) -- Getting Spanish weather alerts could be gone in our area. The National Weather Service (NWS) announced their weather alerts will not renew contracts to translate weather alerts and other products for non-English speakers.

The current Trump administration decisions have led to various budget cuts and layoffs. The NWS was impacted by its decision not to renew with LILT, an artificial intelligence company that replaced manual translations in the department. 

“By eliminating different translations of very critical warnings, we actually take individuals in our community whose primary language is not English and we put them at a disadvantage.” Jason Hough, a professor of Communication Studies and lead instructor of the new climate and environmental resilience ambassador program at Hartnell College said. Hough added that this is a big concern, especially after seeing severe weather alerts around our community.

“The National Weather Service also handles tsunami alerts for our area. So by not having those in English, individuals that that's not their primary language that might be by themselves, maybe they're out working, they're not going to get the same immediate alert,” said Hough. 

We tried contacting NWS at various times. After their decline to comment on camera, they provided a brief statement saying, “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice.”

Through the services of this company, the NWS was able to provide life-saving alerts in languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, French, Samoan and Spanish. Now it seems there is no alternative. 

“There's no solution to fill in the gap that it's going to leave and so, unfortunately, I think the only solution is for states to be able to step up and say, we're going to take care of citizens by providing weather alerts in the languages that are populist-speaks,” he said.

The current contract has been in place since October 2023.