The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is responsible for regulating US interstate and international communications. The agency is overseen by Congress and led by five commissioners appointed by the President.
In general, the FCC issues a Report and Order when responding to public comments and adopting a decision about a proposed rule change, as part of its rule-making process.
At the time of writing, the FCC has so far failed to publish the January 8, 2025, order in the Federal Register.
The Report and Order in question is titled “Wireless Emergency Alerts; Amendments to Part 11 of the Commission’s Rules Regarding the Emergency Alert System,” and is referred to in the letter as the “Multilingual Alerts Order.”
The letter highlights the fact that commercial mobile service (CMS) providers participating in the WEA program will have a 30-month period to comply with the order. However, that compliance period only begins when the order is published in the Federal Register.
Nick Brown, the Attorney General for the State of Washington, was quoted in a press release saying, “in a disaster or other emergency, people need to be able to access critical information about how to keep themselves and their families safe, regardless of the language they speak and read at home. […] The law is clear: the FCC can’t refuse to publish its own rules.”
The authors of the letter are threatening to take “appropriate legal action” against the FCC if they fail to publish the Multilingual Alerts Order within 30 days of receiving the letter.
“In a disaster or other emergency, people need to be able to access critical information about how to keep themselves and their families safe, regardless of the language they speak and read at home.” — Nick Brown, Attorney General, State of Washington
What the Order Includes
The order was written by the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, and is meant to implement decisions from a 2023 WEA Report and Order. It requires participating CMS providers to adopt multilingual templates for alerts related to 18 “common and time-sensitive emergencies.”
Examples include weather alerts for a “tornado emergency,” or “extreme wind,” as well as natural disasters like fire, earthquakes, and avalanches. The list also includes emergencies like 911 outages or “hazardous materials release[s].”
The English template texts for these 18 alert messages were created by the Bureau, and the translations “were developed through a contracted professional translation service” for Arabic, Chinese (traditional and simplified), French, German, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and ASL.
The order requires CMS providers to adopt these multilingual templates with fillable fields for “event-specific information.” This includes the name of the agency sending the alert, when the emergency condition is expected to end, affected locations, and a URL.
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An exception to this requirement was made for the ASL templates, which will be provided as video files but will not include the fillable fields.
The order also states that all alert messages using one of the non-English templates will have to be followed by the English version “as an important public safety redundancy,” and to ensure that individuals with “legacy devices” that cannot display multilingual alerts at least receive the English message.
Interestingly, the order rejected the suggestion from some commenters that AI translation be implemented rather than this template system. The text states that the Commission already rejected the use of machine translation in the 2023 WEA Report and Order, and that the Bureau does not have the authority to change this ruling.
The text also cites concerns from commenters about machine translation accuracy and the potential risk to recipients of mistranslated emergency alerts.
