[EAS] [sbe-eas] More on the Review of the Emergency Alert System from today's FCC Daily Digest

[Mike McCarthy]

We have some experience here as 4 of our stations are brokered ethnic and
we at one time had upwards of 50 languages and dialects on the air across
the broadcast week.  It is impossible to translate all of them except
randomly.  Fortunately, we have staff which are multi-lingual and can keep
an ear to many of the bigger programs for compliance matters. And we've
been very lucky that the FCC has stayed out of our hair.

I am going to go out on a limb and say it will be unlikely a LP-1 or LP-2
will run multiple EAS messages for multiple languages except in locations
where, say, more than 40% speak a single non-English language. And even
then, there will likely be a 2nd LP-2 which does that language and the
voice message is going to be a government read message. Not one generated
by station staff. I think that matter was succinctly covered in a NPRM
recently.

Absent that, it will boil down to an EAS box's ability to properly
enunciate a CPA message and avoid relying on station staff not properly
trained and practiced in sending messages.

MM

On Thu, March 31, 2016 8:13 pm, Adrienne Abbott wrote:
> There's one issue I haven't seen in these discussions on multilingual EAS
> which is a concern of mine...As broadcasters, how do we know that an EAS
> activation issued in a foreign language really is an EAS message? At this
> point, we are trusting a translator at either the station level or at the
> emergency management level, to accurately translate life-saving
> information into another language, one we ourselves don't speak or don't