Published Jan 13, 2023 by MARK THIESSEN FEMA fired the California company hired to translate the documents once the errors became known, but the incident was an ugly reminder for Alaska Natives of the suppression of their culture and languages from decades past.
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.
The book is the written record of field notes collected on Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula across the Bering Strait from Alaska in the 1940s by Ekaterina Rubtsova, who interviewed residents about their daily life and culture for a historical account.
The works were later translated and made available on the language center’s website, which Holton used to investigate the origin of the mistranslated texts.
Holton, who has about three decades experience in Alaska Native language documentation and revitalization, searched the online archive and found “hit after hit,” words pulled right out of the Russian work and randomly placed into FEMA documents.
“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.”
He said it was offensive that an outside company appropriated the words people 80 years ago used to memorialize their lives.
“These are people’s grandparents and great-grandparents that are knowledge-keepers, are elders, and their words which they put down, expecting people to learn from, expecting people to appreciate, have just been bastardized,” Holton said.
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