ANCHORAGE, Alaska – After the leftovers of a rare typhoon caused considerable damage to residences along Alaska’s western shore in September, the U.S. government stepped in to assist locals — primarily Alaska Natives — in repairing property damage.
When people opened FEMA papers, they were hoping to find instructions on how to apply for help in Alaska Native languages like Yup’ik or Inupiaq. Instead, they saw strange words.
“He will go hunting extremely early tomorrow and will (bring) nothing,” stated one paragraph. The translator added the word ” Alaska ” at random amid the sentence.
“Your husband is slender as a polar bear,” observed another.
Another was written entirely in Inuktitut, a Northern Canadian Indigenous language spoken far from Alaska.
Once the mistakes were found, FEMA fired the California company that had been hired to translate the documents. However, the whole thing was a painful reminder for Alaska Natives of how their culture and languages have been suppressed for decades.
FEMA Took Responsibility
FEMA took immediate responsibility for the translation issues and fixed them, and the agency is working to ensure that it does not happen again, according to spokesman Jaclyn Rothenberg. Because of the inaccuracies, no one was denied assistance.
That is insufficient for one Alaska Native leader.
This was another bitter reminder for Tara Sweeney, an Inupiaq who served as an assistant secretary of Indian Affairs in the U.S. Interior Department during the Trump administration, of steps made to discourage Alaska Native children from speaking Indigenous languages.
“Your slender hubby is a polar bear.”
FEMA aid paperwork translated
Thousands Of Alaska Residents
“I can’t even convey the pain behind that sort of symbolism when my mother was beaten for speaking her language in school, like hundreds of thousands of Alaska Natives,” Sweeney said.
Sweeney has asked for a congressional oversight hearing to find out how long and often this method has been used by the administration.
Sweeney’s great-grandfather, Roy Ahmaogak, invented the Inupiaq alphabet more than a half-century ago.
He intended to design the characters so that “our people would learn to read and write to transfer from an oral past to a more tangible written history,” she explained.
U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, a Yup’ik elected to Congress as the first Alaska Native last year, said it was frustrating that FEMA missed the mark with these translations but did not call for hearings.
“I am optimistic that FEMA will continue to make the necessary reforms to ensure that they are ready to serve our residents the next time they are called,” the Democrat added.
The Damage Was Over $28 Million.
The leftovers of Typhoon Merbok caused devastation as it went around 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) north via the Bering Strait, potentially affecting 21,000 persons. According to Rothenberg, FEMA has given out approximately $6.5 million.
A spokeswoman for the Alaska Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, Jeremy Zidek, said that early estimates put the total damage at just over $28 million, but that number is likely to go up as more work is done to assess the damage after the spring thaw.
The poorly translated materials did not cause any delays or problems, but they were just a small part of Zidek’s efforts to help people sign up for FEMA help in person, online, and over the phone.
Gary Holton, a linguistics professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the former director of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says that another reason is that many residents are bilingual and can understand an English version, even if English is not their first language.
Central Alaskan Yup’ik is the most spoken Alaska Native language, with more than 10,000 speakers in 68 communities in southwest Alaska. In 17 of the settlements, children learn Yup’ik as their first language. According to the language center, there are around 3,000 Inupiaq speakers in northern Alaska.
The terms and phrases used in the translated texts appear to be drawn from Nikolai Vakhtin’s 2011 edition of “Yupik Eskimo Texts from the 1940s,” according to the language center’s archivist, John DiCandeloro.
Local Languages Similar Not The Same
The book is a written record of field notes taken by Ekaterina Rubtsova in the 1940s in Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula, across the Bering Strait from Alaska, who interviewed residents about their daily lives and culture for a historical history.
The works were eventually translated and posted on the language center’s website, which Holton used to track down the source of the mistranslated pieces.
According to Holton, many of the local languages are similar but not the same, just as English is related but not the same as French or German.
Holton has spent nearly three decades documenting and revitalizing Alaska Native languages, reviewed the web database and discovered “hit after hit,” phrases taken directly from the Russian book and randomly placed into FEMA documents.
“They just pulled the words from the document and then just arranged them in some random order and gave something that looked like Yup’ik but made no sense,” he added, referring to the result as a “word salad.”
Hijacked Terms
He found it disrespectful that an outside company hijacked the terms people used to memorialize their life 80 years ago.
“These are people’s grandparents and great-grandparents who are knowledge-keepers, elders, and their words that they wrote down, wanting people to learn from and cherish, have just been bastardized,” Holton added.
Bethel’s KYUK Public Media first reported the mistranslations.
“We make no excuses for erroneous translations, and we profoundly regret any inconvenience this has caused to the local community,” said Caroline Lee, CEO of Accent on Languages, the Berkeley, California-based company that generated the mistranslated documents.
She stated that the company would repay FEMA the $5,116 it was paid for the service and undertake an internal investigation to guarantee that it does not happen again.
Lee did not answer follow-up queries about how the incorrect translations happened.
SOURCE – (AP)
