This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
By Ayurella Horn-Muller, Grist
At the beginning of last month, the National Weather Service, or NWS, discontinued its automated emergency-weather translation services in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Samoan. The agency had decided not to renew its contract with Lilt, an AI-translation platform.
Then, just about three weeks after the contract lapsed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the NWS is a subagency, shared an update: The automated translation services would be back up and running as of April 28.
The agency’s back-and-forth turned April into a monthlong test case: How would communities around the U.S. fare without adequate information during extreme weather events?
In the span of a single week, belts of Louisiana were battered by flash flooding, while severe storms brought deadly hail and heavy rain to parts of Oklahoma and Texas, and a succession of destructive tornadoes touched down in nine states. Alarms flashed across screens and blared on radios warning people to get to safety. Many of those messages, however, were issued only in English.
One thing that’s certain is that the increasing frequency and strength, due to climate change, of these events will make life harder for people everywhere. NOAA’s decision sparked an uproar across the country, as advocates and policymakers spoke out against the Trump administration — and the millions of people it put at undue risk.
Monica Bozeman, who leads the National Weather Service’s automated language translations, told Grist that the agency’s contract with Lilt has been renewed for another year. A week after NOAA’s update, however, that restoration is still underway. “We are in the process of standing back up the last few translation sites,” said Bozeman.
The agency confirmed that Lilt’s software will once again generate translations for 30 of its regional weather forecast offices throughout the nation, in addition to the National Hurricane Center. The Lilt models automatically translate urgent updates and warnings from the NWS, which are then posted on websites like weather.gov and hurricanes.gov, and voiced over NOAA’s weather radio. The agency is still “working to restart AI translations,” said Bozeman, to populate those websites and broadcasts.
“The NWS is committed to enhancing the accessibility of vital, lifesaving weather information by making urgent weather alerts available to the public in multiple languages,” Bozeman said. “Utilizing artificial intelligence allows us to keep up with this level of demand.”
When asked about the NWS shuttering radio translations in the southern region, as previously first reported by Grist, Bozeman said the agency is “working to turn on that capability for the NOAA Weather Radio to broadcast the translated information coming from Lilt AI translations at the affected sites.”
Neither Bozeman nor a national NOAA spokesperson addressed Grist’s requests for further information.
For instance, the agency has remained tight-lipped about why translation services were suspended in the first place and has not clarified why it moved to reinstate the contract. It also did not provide a timeline on when to expect all stalled translations to be restored to their former capacity or address whether the ongoing workforce cuts have impeded progress. Representatives from Lilt did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Analysts say the reasons for the initial decision may be linked to what they see as the administration’s “act first, ask questions later” approach to policy. Public response is also likely to have helped propel the weather agency’s sudden backtrack.
“What I’m noticing with this administration is a huge trend where certain pressures really work on them when it comes to walking back the things that they’re doing,” said Priya Pandey, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy. Those include economic levers, as seen with tariffs, she noted, as well as the court of public opinion. “Republican Congress members that have some of these weather centers in their districts were putting pressure on the administration to look into this and look into the impacts of the rollbacks on NOAA.”
The New York Times reported that as of May 2, about 10% of the weather service’s total staff have been terminated or accepted buyout offers. Now it appears that more turbulence is in store for the agency: President Donald Trump’s budget proposal includes significant cuts to NOAA’s budget and the dismantling of its research arm. Five former NWS leaders wrote in a letter dated Friday that they feared the cuts would lead to understaffing in weather forecast offices and “needless loss of life.”
With the exceptions of New York and Hawaiʻi, which mandate their own statewide emergency translation services, few other states have adopted similar comprehensive models enforcing multilingual information accessibility in the event of a disaster.
Pandey thinks that could very well change, as the federal government’s anti-immigrant approach could prompt some states to adopt their own inclusive emergency management policies while also ramping up the need for community-led efforts.
The executive order that Trump signed in March that designated English as the country’s official language and rescinded a Clinton-era mandate for federally funded agencies and entities to provide language aid to non-English speakers, said Pandey, “doesn’t prohibit people from translating things outright.”
Still, she noted, the order does make what used to be a prerequisite entirely voluntary and provides government institutions such as the NWS or NOAA, in addition to state and county-level emergency management operations, the ability to “outright ignore providing translations.”
In the days following the initial announcement from the NWS, the Nebraska Commission on Latino-Americans doubled down on its commitment to provide translated extreme weather alerts to residents statewide. Executive Director María Arriaga told Grist the “pivotal” decision exposed how vulnerable non-English-speaking communities become “when translation infrastructure disappears overnight” and pushed the commission into action.
They’ve since accelerated conversations with state agencies to develop the framework for a multilingual emergency information plan, initially serving Spanish speakers, with the goal to also support residents who speak K’iche’, Arabic and Vietnamese.
“While we are not a weather agency, we step in as a connector, disseminating accurate and timely information where we see that essential communication is missing or inaccessible,” said Arriaga. “Language should never be a barrier when lives are at stake.”
Kate Yoder contributed reporting to this story. This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/the-national-weather-service-reinstated-translation-alerts-what-happened/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.
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