A COMPANY THAT accrued more than a million dollars in contracts with federal agencies over the last two decades has reimbursed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for its faulty and potentially fraudulent translation work — a first in the agency’s history.
In the aftermath of a historic storm fueled by Typhoon Merbok — which pummeled Alaska’s West Coast last September — FEMA hired a California-based company called Accent on Languages to translate financial assistance information into two Alaska Native languages: Yugtun, the Central Yup’ik dialect, and Iñupiaq. Both Indigenous languages are spoken in Alaska today, though they were prohibited in the past by both the state and federal governments. Accent on Languages issued the refund after public radio station KYUK first reported that the company’s translations were nothing more than “word salad,” according to one
