[EAS] Serving Multilingual audience

[Dave Turnmire]

On 10/23/2017 12:05 PM, Ray Dall wrote:
> If we can have a garmin tell us which way to turn a car, certainly we can have an EAS box simply speak to us and tell us
> "There is a TORNADO WARNING for the following counties..."
>
> They need not have full time employees - just a one time interpretation into the various languages, then have the box do it from there.
That may be better than nothing in some cases... especially for 
non-English alerts.  But as has been discussed repeatedly on this 
list... some counties in this country are LARGE geographically and it is 
very important to have the voice part of the message to clarify an event 
that may cover only a portion of a county. Arguably that is an issue 
more common with non-weather emergency alerts, but still something to be 
considered for some weather alerts.
> The Fed can even do it, and I'll bet that working somewhere in our federal government, is some military guy who already, as part of his job, is an interpreter - already bought and paid for by our tax dollars.
The rub is the time element.  Our state's emergency management has 
access to translators when needed for various emergencies.  But... it 
takes time to reach those translators.  They aren't on site normally.  
It makes little sense to delay sending an alert for 95%+ of our citizens 
(thus potentially risking their lives), while we wait on getting a 
translator for the remaining few percent so we can send out a bi-lingual 
alert.

Dave