A California company hired to translate documents for Alaska Natives filled the forms with illogical and meaningless sentences and phrases instead of valuable information that would have allowed them to access life-saving aid, local station KYUK reported.
In September, the remnants of Typhoon Merbok swept across northwestern Alaska, resulting in flooding and destroyed homes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency opened applications to allow residents to access millions of dollars in aid and hired a company called Accent on Languages to translate forms into languages like Yup'ik and Iñupiaq.
The translations, however, were inaccurate and sometimes misidentified languages, according to experts who spoke with KYUK.
For example, a document labeled as being Iñupiaq, an indigenous language spoken in Northwestern Alaska and Canada, was actually written in Inuktitut, which follows a completely different alphabet system and is spoken in Northeast Canada, KYUK reported.
In one press release, a sentence that should have read “State News Desk” actually read “when she said so, the dog ran farther off from the curtain,” according to KYUK.
In other documents, the word “Alaska” was randomly inserted throughout sentences, according to experts who spoke to the Associated Press. One document contained the sentence “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny,” the AP reported.
