Press Release – LANGUAGE ACCESS FOR SEVERE WEATHER EMERGENCY ALERTS
Attorney General William Tong joined a coalition of 16 attorneys general and New York City in calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to expand language access for critical government alerts sent to cell phones, known as Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs). In a comment letter, the coalition acknowledges the important steps FCC has taken to expand access to WEAs but notes that this proposal would require wireless companies to use machine translation rather than human translation for WEAs and would only include translations for 13 languages. Following multiple severe weather emergencies across the country, Attorney General Tong and the coalition urge FCC to adopt its alternative proposal to use human translators, which are far more reliable, instead of machine translation, and…