[EAS] Serving Multilingual audience

[Harold Price]

Ray,

Well, yes, but...

Sage (and TFT) did this back starting in 1997, that is, provided both 
English and Spanish translations of the three letter codes and the 
boilerplate portions of EAS for the log and the crawl.  In these 
modern times, also having pre-translated audio to go along with it is 
more of a social engineering problem than a technical one.

One of the benefits of supporting CAP, though, was to allow 
originators to send free-form text - and that is where the problem 
lies.  The advocates for multilingual alerts ultimately want the same 
information provided in all included languages - and ASL.  They are 
not interested in getting full text in one language with condensed 
headlines or a door bell in other languages.

The technique to pre-position a translated headline for a list of 
event codes, such as "tornado warning for" is straightforward - 
though getting agreement for the culturally correct version of it 
might not be.

Here are some examples for alerts where detailed information, not 
just the event code, could be template-based at the originator, and 
therefore more easily able to take advantage of pre-translated 
phrases or blocks - in order of increasing complexity:

1) There has been a shooting near the Clearlake Oaks Post Office. 
Please shelter-in-place until further notice.

2) Evacuation UPDATE! Shelter in Place or go to the Community Center 
on Wolf Creek Road. New Long Valley Road is CLOSED.

3) The City of Jewett needs residents to boil water from the city 
water supply until further notice. The city has a water main break 
and the repairs are in progress. Again Boil water until further 
notice. Call 555-1212 if needing further instructions. Thank You for 
your patience.

But as things get more complex, even with #3 above, you can start a 
slide into limiting the amount of information provided in the main 
language to allow it to fit into templates that allow easy 
translation into other languages.

Amber alerts are even more difficult due to the large amount of 
information provided.  Take a look at the non-weather IPAWS alert 
blog which has been mentioned here many times to see what originators 
are doing.

I hope at the regulatory level that we can arrive at reasonable 
approach to this - allowing local communities to select what they can 
support - both in time, talent, and cost, and allow for sometimes 
only headline-based information in other languages as a starting 
point. That is better than giving no information at all.

Template-based translation is, in come cases, a reasonable first step.

Harold

At 02:05 PM 10/23/2017, Ray Dall wrote:
>MUCH of what is sent by the EAS system is so generic that it can be 
>simplified down to a simple three letter code (TOR, SVR, etc).  Once 
>those simple codes (TOR = Tornado Warning) is interpreted and an 
>audio file made for those codes, the rest is surperfluous.