Emergency Alert and Public Health Message Translation in Pashto, Dari and 22 More Afghan Languages

Not through Wireless Emergency Alerts today. WEA carries free text only in English and Spanish, and the FCC’s new templates, due by June 12, 2028, cover 13 languages, including Spanish, and American Sign Language, but not Pashto or Dari. You can still reach Pashto and Dari speakers: send the English or Spanish alert with a link to a Pashto and Dari page, and push the same message by text, voice call, social media, radio and trusted community messengers. We write and record each version.

For agencies on a standby agreement, Pashto and Dari text for an alert of up to 360 characters comes back within 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, independently reviewed by a second linguist. Recorded audio follows within 60 minutes. Messages from your pre-translated library are ready in seconds, and public health guidance of up to 1,500 words comes back within 24 hours.

Today, English and Spanish. By June 12, 2028, phones will also hold FCC templates for 18 alert types in the 13 most common languages after English: Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic, French, Korean, Russian, Haitian Creole, German, Hindi, Portuguese and Italian, plus American Sign Language. A phone set to any other language, including Pashto or Dari, shows the alert in English.

Use every channel the alert can travel on. Add a short link to a Pashto and Dari page in your WEA, which supports embedded links. Send Pashto and Dari text through your mass notification system, record voice messages for phone calls and WhatsApp, post to social media, give radio stations a script and brief community messengers. We deliver each format sized for its channel.

Yes. Native Pashto and Dari speakers record every library message and, on activation, new alerts within 60 minutes. Female and male voices are available, and Dari can be recorded in the Kabuli, Herati, Hazaragi or Badakhshi dialect on request. Audio matters: in Afghanistan, 37% of adults can read (UNESCO, 2021), so a voice message reaches people a text cannot.

No. Dari and Iranian Persian, or Farsi, share a script, but everyday words differ, and residents notice. An Afghan reader expects کلکین for window and موتر for car; a Farsi translation writes پنجره and ماشین. The standard Census language table counts Dari under “Persian,” so Farsi is easy to buy by mistake. We translate into Afghan Dari.

Usually both. Afghan immigrants report Pashto (32%), Dari (26%) and Persian (27%) as their home language, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Many read one language but speak the other, and some read neither, so we recommend Pashto and Dari text plus audio. We can help you size need in your area from Census microdata, since the standard Census language table does not show Pashto or Dari on its own.

Not on its own. In a 2021 study of emergency department instructions, Google Translate kept the meaning of 94% of Spanish sentences but only 67.5% of Farsi sentences, and it reversed the right-to-left layout. Pashto and Dari have less training data still. We use AI only in controlled tools, never public ones, and a second qualified linguist independently reviews every message. We also review machine-translated Pashto and Dari from your alerting platform.

We translate, review and record your most likely messages in advance, starting from the FCC’s 18 alert types and adding boil-water, heat, smoke, outbreak and shelter-in-place notices. Each has fill-in fields for time, place and route. When an emergency comes, your team fills in the fields and sends, and we confirm the fill-ins within 15 minutes.

Seventy per single text message. Pashto and Dari use Arabic script, which phones send in UCS-2 encoding, so one message holds 70 characters instead of 160 in English, and longer messages split into 67-character segments. We write Pashto and Dari to fit your limits and test that letters such as ځ, څ and ښ display correctly.

Not always in full, but often in part. Under EPA’s Public Notification Rule, when a large proportion of a water system’s consumers don’t speak English, as the state determines, the notice must carry information in their language about its importance, or say where to get a translated copy or help (40 CFR 141.205). Tier 1 notices, such as boil-water notices after an E. coli violation, are due within 24 hours. We keep Pashto and Dari boil-water templates ready.

In many cases, yes. Executive Order 14224 revoked Executive Order 13166 in 2025 but does not require agencies to stop services in other languages. Title VI still bars national-origin discrimination in federally funded programs, the Stafford Act bars discrimination in disaster assistance on the basis of English proficiency, and California, Washington and the District of Columbia set their own thresholds. This is not legal advice.

Calmly and specifically. Many Afghan residents lived through the Afghan war, and some carry war trauma or moral injury, sometimes called moral trauma. Germany’s federal civil protection office notes that warning sirens can frighten people who have lived through war, as well as some older people and children. We lead with the action, name the source, avoid military language and label every test as a test.

Pashto and Dari at every response time, 24 hours a day. Uzbeki, Turkmeni, Balochi, Pashayi and Aimaq within four hours, in text and audio. The other 17 Afghan languages, including Wakhi, Shughni, Kyrgyz and Brahui, are delivered audio-first by arrangement, because many are rarely written.

Yes. Canada’s Alert Ready, the UK’s Emergency Alerts and Germany’s NINA app do not carry Pashto or Dari, and Afghan communities there are large: 449,780 Afghan nationals lived in Germany at the end of 2025. We work from English, French and German source text and handle personal data on GDPR and UK GDPR terms.

Through a standby agreement. We review your hazards and communities, fix your glossary, build and record your message library, test your channels, and put named on-call linguists and a 24/7 activation line on your roster. Agencies can start with a purchase order for the readiness work and a joint exercise.