Life imitates art

FEMA’s language aid for Eskimos turns out to be just the blubbering of a madman

FEMA has fired the California group that translated its indigenous-language paperwork for Alaskan natives because it was gibberish

· · Jan 17, 2023 · NottheBee.com

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) just fired the Berkley, California group responsible for translating aid documents into indigenous languages for native Alaskans because their translations were nonsensical.

As of this writing, it's unknown if President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris were involved in any way with the wording of said gibberish.

When the remnants from Typhoon Merbok hit Alaska with a significant storm surge in September 2022, infrastructure in 35 coastal communities needed federal aid to be repaired, but when the indigenous leaders received copies of the paperwork in their native language, they found it was nonsense:

"Your husband is a polar bear, skinny," read one helpful step.

It appears the words and phrases were lifted wholesale from a 2011 edition of "Yupik Eskimo Texts from the 1940s," which is a record of field notes on Russia's Chukotka Peninsula by Ekaterina Rubtsova and was recently made available on the Alaska Native Language Center.

John DiCandeloro, the language centers archivist said,

"They clearly just grabbed the words from the document and then just put them in some random order and gave something that looked like Yup'ik but made no sense," he said, calling the final product a "word salad."