The National Weather Service has stopped providing language translations for its products — and experts warn that the change could put non-English speakers’ lives at risk when extreme weather strikes.

The weather service “paused” the translations because its contract with Lilt, an artificial intelligence company that provided the service, lapsed, NWS spokesperson Michael Musher said. 

The AI company began providing translations in late 2023, replacing the manual interpretations at the NWS that the agency claimed were labor-intensive and not sustainable. 

The company provided translations in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Samoan. 

Lilt did not respond to requests for comment. 

Nearly 68 million people in America speak a language other than English at home, including 42 million Spanish speakers, according to the US Census.

Joseph Trujillo-Falcón, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, warned that ending translations in multiple languages could have deadly results. 

The researcher, who has worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researching how to translate weather and climate information to the public, noted how the service saved lives in the deadly tornado outbreak in Kentucky in 2021. 

A Spanish-speaking family told reporters that they had initially ignored the English warnings on their phone because they couldn’t read them, with the family eventually taking shelter after the alerts came in Spanish. 

“It saved their life,” Trujillo-Falcón said.

“If they don’t have access to that National Weather Service information in the different languages, that could be the difference between life and death for somebody,” warned Norma Mendoza-Denton, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University, also warned that the lack of translations could have other effects outside of extreme weather events. 

Unreliable access to forecasts could alter how millions carry on in their daily lives, which inturn could impact the tourism, transportation, and energy sectors, he warned. 

The contract lapse comes as the Trump administration continues to slash spending in federal agencies, including cuts within the NOAA that have led to high employee vacancy rates at NWS offices.

The agency has warned that the overhaul would impact their ability to monitor and predict extreme weather in an age where climate-induced disasters have grown more common. 

With Post wires