The National Weather Service stopped its language translation services, which will impact emergency alerts for non-English speakers.
With less than a few months before the start of hurricane season, the halt adds another layer of uncertainty for thousands of Houstonians who depend on emergency alerts.
“Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice,” reads a message issued on April 1.
The NWS provided no other updates, including when translation services will resume.
The NWS moved from manual translations to artificial intelligence in late 2023, when it announced it had “teamed up with Lilt,” a company that offers AI translation services for businesses. This partnership allowed NWS to automate its translations starting with Spanish and Chinese. It later expanded to include Vietnamese, Samoan and French.
“Manually translating our forecasts is labor intensive and not sustainable,” read a press release issued in October 2023. “Using the AI model during our pilot project, our Spanish forecasters reduced the time needed to translate National Hurricane Center storm products from 1 hour to less than 10 minutes, which allows them to focus more time on their core duties of forecasting and decision support services.”
In Houston, nearly 30 percent of all residents are foreign born, according to Census data, and about 47 percent of all Houston residents speak a language other than English.
Woori Juntos, a Houston-based nonprofit organization that provides translation services to Asian and immigrant residents across the state, issued a statement last week calling for an immediate return to translated alerts, but with an investment in human translators and community-led translation services.
“From Gulfton to Alief to Spring Branch, people across Houston rely on translated alerts
to know when to evacuate, where to get water or shelter, and how to protect themselves,” the Woori Juntos news release reads. “But when Hurricane Beryl and other major storms hit in 2024, many residents told us they were left completely in the dark.”
Organization leaders warn that artificial intelligence should not be fully trusted for accurate translations during a disaster, citing a recent study that found that Google Translate was only 59 percent accurate when translating hospital discharge instructions.
“AI doesn’t understand our people,” said Quynh-Huong Nguyen, communications manager at Woori Juntos. “It doesn’t know how we speak, what we need, or what we fear during a storm. We need human translators who care and can be trusted.”
Alain Cisneros of the immigration rights organization FIEL said this change is yet another hurdle for many migrant families who are feeling targeted under the Trump administration. The organization often issues alerts and disaster resources in Spanish to migrant communities that might be left out of the loop.
His concern, however, doesn’t stop with lack of translated alerts, but with this trend possibly expanding to lack of translation resources for disaster relief applications.
“This could make it harder to prove that you qualify for disaster relief,” Cisneros said. “There’s going to be more hurricanes, floods, freezes … We have at least four events per year where we can experience substantial loss of resources in Houston. That’s going to be harder.”
It is unclear if this service will be restored, as these changes come on the heels of federal job cuts under the Trump administration, which resulted in a 20 percent vacancy rate at about half of the NWS forecast offices, according to the Associated Press.
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