FEMA aid for Alaska Natives contained translation errors, nonsense

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — After waves and strong winds from the remnants of a rare typhoon caused extensive damage to homes along Alaska’s west coast in September, the U.S. government stepped in to help residents — mostly Alaska Natives – to repair property damage. .

Residents who opened Federal Emergency Management Agency documents expecting to find instructions on how to make emergency calls in Alaska Native languages ​​such as Yup’ik or Inupiaq were instead reading bizarre phrases.

“To-morrow he will go hunting very early and (bring) nothing,” reads one passage. The translator randomly added the word “Alaska” in the middle of the sentence.

“Your husband is a skinny polar bear,” said another.

Another was written entirely in Inuktitut, an indigenous language spoken in northern Canada, far from Alaska.

FEMA fired the California firm it hired to translate the documents once the errors became known, but the incident was a stark reminder to Alaska Natives of the suppression of their culture and languages ​​decades ago.

FEMA immediately took responsibility for the translation errors and corrected them, and the agency is working to make sure it doesn’t happen again, spokeswoman Jaclyn Rothenberg said. No one was denied help because of mistakes.

That’s not enough for an Alaska Native leader.

For Tara Sweeney, an Inupiaq who served as assistant secretary of Indian affairs in the U.S. Department of the Interior during the Trump administration, it was another painful reminder of the measures taken to prevent Alaska Native children from speaking their native languages.

“When my mother was beaten for speaking her language in school, like so many hundreds, thousands of Alaska Natives, and then the federal government distributed literature that said it was an Alaska Native language, I can’t even describe the emotion behind They. kind of symbolism,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney requested a congressional oversight hearing to find out how long and how widespread the practice has been around the government.

“These translators with government contracts have certainly taken advantage of the system and, in my opinion, have had a profound impact on vulnerable communities,” said Sweeney, whose great-grandfather, Roy Ahmaogak, invented more than half of the Inupiaq alphabet. century ago.

He said his intention was to create the characters so that “our people learn to read and write to move from an oral history to a more tangible written history.”

U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, who is Yup’ik and last year became the first Alaska Native elected to Congress, said it was disappointing that FEMA missed the mark with these translations, but she did not request hearings.

“I am confident that FEMA will continue to make the changes necessary to be ready the next time our citizens are called into service,” the Democrat said.

About 1,300 people have been approved for FEMA assistance after the remnants of Typhoon Merbok wreaked havoc as it traveled about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) north across the Bering Strait, potentially affecting 21,000 residents. FEMA paid about $6.5 million, Rothenberg said.

Preliminary estimates put the total damage at just over $28 million, but the total is likely to rise after the spring thaw, said Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

The poorly translated documents, which did not create delays or problems, were a small part of efforts to help people register for FEMA assistance in person, online and by phone, Zidek said.

Another factor is that while English may not be the language of choice for some residents, many are bilingual and can struggle with an English version, said Gary Holton, a linguistics professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and former director of the Center from Alaska. Native Languages ​​at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Central Alaska Yup’ik is the largest of the Alaska Native languages, with approximately 10,000 speakers in 68 villages in southwest Alaska. Children learn Yup’ik as their first language in 17 of these villages. There are about 3,000 Inupiaq speakers in northern Alaska, according to the language center.

The words and phrases used in the translated documents appear to have been taken from Nikolai Vakhtin’s 2011 edition “Yupik Eskimo Texts of the 1940s,” said John DiCandeloro, archivist at the language center.

The book is the written record of field notes collected on Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula across the Bering Strait from Alaska in the 1940s by Ekaterina Rubtsova, who interviewed residents about their daily lives and culture for a historical account.

The documents were later translated and made available on the language center’s website, which Holton used to investigate the origin of the mistranslated texts.

Many of the area’s languages ​​are related but with differences, just as English is related to French or German but not the same language, Holton said.

Holton, who has nearly 30 years of experience documenting and revitalizing the Alaska Native language, searched the online archive and found “blow for battle,” words taken straight from the Russian newspaper and randomly inserted into FEMA documents.

“They clearly took the words from the document and then mixed them up and came up with something that looked like Yup’ik but didn’t make sense,” he said, calling the final product “word salad.”

He said it was offensive that an outside company would appropriate the words people used 80 years ago to remember their lives.

“These are the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of the people who keep the knowledge. They’re old and their words have let them down. They’re waiting for people to learn from people. They’re waiting for people to appreciate. They’ve just been bastardized,” Holton said.

Public media KYUK in Bethel was the first to report the translation errors.

“We do not apologize for the mistranslations and deeply regret any inconvenience this may have caused the local community,” said Caroline Lee, CEO of Accent on Languages, the Berkeley, California-based company that produced the incorrectly translated documents.

He said the company will repay FEMA the $5,116 it received for the work and conduct an internal review to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Lee did not respond to follow-up questions, including how the mistranslations came about.