RALEIGH, N.C. — The National Weather Service will no longer be translating its products into other languages.
The agency said the contract for a service that uses artificial intelligence to broadcast warnings to people who do not speak English has lapsed.
The change comes during President Donald Trump's efforts to downsize federal government, and after hundreds of staffers at the NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were fired.
The Associated Press reports that the decision to halt translations of forecasts and warnings could affect nearly 68 million people across the nation who do not speak English at home.
An advocate for farmworkers in North Carolina recalled the devastation during Hurricane Florence in 2018.
“When things happen so quickly, a lot of them ended up stranded in the middle of water,” said Sylvia Zapata, executive director at Student Action with Farmworkers, a nonprofit that works to improve conditions for farmworkers in North Carolina.
She said the storm was especially hard on non-native farmers who don’t speak English.
Zapata said that in 2018, there weren’t many weather service providers that offered translations for non-English speakers.
That changed in 2023, when the National Weather Service began using artificial intelligence from a company called Lilt to provide warnings and forecasts in Spanish and other languages.
Zapata said 60% of the people she works with come from farming and agriculture backgrounds, and many migrated from Mexico.
“Many of the farmworkers here in North Carolina come here with a visa,” she said. “So the growers recruit them, and they're here legally.”
She’s concerned the pause in translations could put non-English speakers at risk during extreme weather like a hurricane or tornado.
“Because if people are out traveling, when the advisory says that you shouldn't, then when there's an emergency situation and only emergency vehicles should be out, you're going to have a lot of the populations that aren't English speaking out and they're not going to be aware of the danger,” Zapata said.
Spanish is the second most spoken language in the state, according to North Carolina's Office of State Budget and Management.
The agency said that during 2018-22, close to 800,000 people spoke Spanish at home in North Carolina.
Zapata said this data shows just how important it is to make all information understandable to non-native speakers.
She said the nation relies heavily on farmers for produce, and with North Carolina being a big agriculture state, the country should protect the farmworkers and make their jobs safer and easier.
“As we learned from the pandemic, the lesson that we learned is that we all need each other,” Zapata said. “And we cannot forget that lesson. And the folks that we needed the most were people who didn't speak English.”
The National Weather Service said in an administrative message April 1: “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice. This is all we can offer at this time.”
Lilt also provided translations in Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Samoan.
Zapata said that she doesn’t know what will happen next but that in the meantime, her agency has an app that provides English and Spanish weather alerts.
