Emergency Aid Applications in Alaska Native Languages Full

  • A California company translated FEMA documents into outrageous phrases in Indigenous languages. 
  • The company pulled different passages from old books and misidentified languages. 
  • Alaska Natives quickly noticed the errors, saying it highlights the erasure of their languages.

A California company hired to translate documents for Alaska Natives filled the forms with illogical and meaningless sentences and phrases instead of valuable information that would have allowed them to access life-saving aid, local station KYUK reported. 

In September, the remnants of Typhoon Merbok swept across northwestern Alaska, resulting in flooding and destroyed homes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency opened applications to allow residents to access millions of dollars in aid and hired a company called Accent on Languages to translate forms into languages like Yup’ik and Iñupiaq. 

The translations, however, were inaccurate and sometimes misidentified languages, according to experts who spoke with KYUK. 

For example, a document labeled as being Iñupiaq, an indigenous language spoken in Northwestern Alaska and Canada, was actually written in Inuktitut, which follows a completely different alphabet system and is spoken in Northeast Canada, KYUK reported.

In one press release, a sentence that should have read “State News Desk” actually read “when she said so, the dog ran farther off from the curtain,” according to KYUK.

In other documents, the word “Alaska” was randomly inserted throughout sentences, according to experts who spoke to the Associated Press. One document contained the sentence “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny,” the AP reported. 

Some of the phrases used in the documents were lifted from literature written in various Alaska Native languages, experts told the AP.

Tara Sweeney, an Iñupiaq who previously worked for the U.S. Interior Department, told the AP that the errors contained “symbolism” that harked back to the time when Alaska Native languages were being erased in boarding schools in the 1900s.

“When my mother was beaten for speaking her language in school, like so many hundreds, thousands of Alaska Natives, to then have the federal government distributing literature representing that it is an Alaska Native language, I can’t even describe the emotion behind that sort of symbolism,” Sweeney told the AP.

Jaclyn Rothenberg, a spokesperson for FEMA, told the AP the agency fired the company responsible and re-translated the documents. The aid was also not postponed as a result of the error, Rothenberg told the AP.

Caroline Lee, CEO of Accent on Languages, said in a statement to Insider that a “horrifying” issue like this has never happened in the company’s 30 years of operation and the translators responsible for the mistranslations were terminated.

Lee also said that Accent on Languages has implemented “additional checks and balances” and said they would refund FEMA for the cost of the “erroneous translations.”

FEMA did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.