San Francisco, California — Lilt, a leading AI solution for enterprise translation, is proud to provide the AI-powered technology behind a new experimental language translation website by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS). The new multilingual website provides translated weather products, a hazards map, and numerous outreach infographics to better inform low-English-proficiency communities about the weather and preparedness. The website is open for public comment through September 29, 2024.
“This language translation project will improve our service equity to traditionally underserved and vulnerable populations that have limited English proficiency,” said Ken Graham, director of NWS. “By providing weather forecasts and warnings in multiple languages, the NWS will improve community and individual readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events.”
NWS forecasters have been working with Lilt over the past two years through a series of pilot projects to provide the most accurate weather, water, and climate terminology in Spanish and Simplified Chinese — the most common non-English languages in the United States. Samoan and Vietnamese are next on the roadmap, followed by more languages in the future.
The NWS reports that Lilt reduced the time required for forecasters to translate the National Hurricane Center storm products by over 83% (from one hour to less than 10 minutes). The NWS has developed and tested a process to rapidly and cost-effectively produce accurate, fine-tuned translations for any major language, including languages that the NWS has never supported at scale before.
“From day one, Lilt has been on a mission to make the world’s information available to everyone, irrespective of language,” said Lilt CEO Spence Green. “We believe that language should never be a barrier to survival. We could not be more proud and aligned with the NWS to ensure that all people have access to lifesaving weather warnings and forecasts.”
More details about this project can be found in NOAA’s media alert.
