Government officials say documents aimed at helping Alaska Natives apply for aid following typhoon damage last fall featured nonsensical phrases instead of useful instructions
FILE - Fredrick Brower, center, helps cut up a bowhead whale caught by Inupiat subsistence hunters on a field near Barrow, Alaska, Oc. 7, 2014. After tidal surges and high winds from the remnants of a rare typhoon caused extensive flood damage to homes along Alaska's western coast in September, the U.S. government stepped in to help residents largely Alaska Natives repair property damage.
FEMA immediately took responsibility for the translation errors and corrected them, and the agency is working to make sure it doesn’t happen again, spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg said. No one was denied aid because of the errors.For Tara Sweeney, an Inupiaq who served as an assistant secretary of Indian Affairs in the U.S. Interior Department during the Trump administration, this was another painful reminder of steps taken to prevent Alaska Native children from speaking Indigenous languages.
She said his intention was to create the characters so “our people would learn to read and write to transition from an oral history to a more tangible written history.” Preliminary estimates put overall damage at just over $28 million, but the total is likely to rise after more assessment work is done after the spring thaw, said Jeremy Zidek, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
It appears the words and phrases used in the translated documents were taken from Nikolai Vakhtin’s 2011 edition of “Yupik Eskimo Texts from the 1940s,” said John DiCandeloro, the language center's archivist.
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