Why churches translate the worship service
Picture a typical Sunday. A family from Guatemala sits near the back. A grandmother who moved in with her son's family speaks Korean at home and nods politely through an English sermon. A Brazilian couple came because a coworker invited them. A refugee family your church helped resettle last spring speaks Ukrainian or Arabic. They can stand for the songs and follow the rhythm of the service, but thirty-five minutes of preaching mostly passes them by.
Translation changes that. People who used to be guests can hear the Word preached, follow the announcements, respond to an invitation and know when the potluck is. It also takes pressure off the bilingual members who have been quietly whispering in someone's ear every week, and it lets a guest preacher from abroad speak in the language they preach best in.
Four ways to do it
Churches usually choose between four approaches. A bilingual volunteer whispers for one or two people. A volunteer interpreter speaks into a microphone while listeners wear receiver headsets. A professional interpreter is booked for special events. Or the church uses church translation software that translates the speaker live with AI and sends the result to listeners' phones.
None of these is right for everything. Human interpreters bring judgment, warmth and pastoral sense that software does not have. An app can cover several languages at once, every week, without finding a volunteer for each one. Our interpreter or AI comparison lays the options side by side. The rest of this guide is about live AI translation with ChurchTranslate.
How live AI translation works
The speaker's voice travels from your sound system into a laptop or phone that runs the ChurchTranslate broadcast page in a web browser. The audio is streamed to the translation service, where AI recognizes the speech, translates it and speaks it in each chosen language. Listeners scan a QR code, choose a language and hear a translated voice on their own phone, a few seconds behind the speaker, along with live captions.
Listeners need no account and nothing to install: the listening page opens in the browser on any smartphone, iPhone or Android. People who prefer an app can get the ChurchTranslate iOS app in the App Store. On the listening page, visitors can turn the translated audio off and only read captions, show the original text next to the translation, or switch to a large-text reading mode.
ChurchTranslate translates into 79 languages, including Spanish, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Vietnamese, Filipino, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, French, Persian (Farsi) and many more. Your church switches on up to 40 of them, and visitors pick from that list. The pastor can preach in any of the same 79 languages; you set the speaker language in the church settings and change it with one tap during the service.
Step by step: from idea to first Sunday
- 01Decide who you want to reach
Talk it through with your pastor, staff or elders. Are you serving a Hispanic ministry, refugee families, international students, a second generation that prefers English? The answer decides your languages and how you announce it.
- 02Create your church account
Sign up on the registration page, name your church, set the speaker language (English for most US churches, Spanish or Korean for many others) and choose which languages visitors may select. Your church portal can be in English with your own time zone.
- 03Run the free trial service
Every new church gets a free 10-minute trial service. Do it on a weekday: one person talks at the front, someone else listens on a phone in the fellowship hall. Ten minutes of testing teaches more than an hour of reading.
- 04Connect the sound
Give the broadcast laptop the cleanest audio you have, ideally an aux or matrix output from your mixer through a USB audio interface. The audio setup guide has the details.
- 05Build a small team
Invite a second and third tech volunteer to your team account, so translation does not depend on one person. Brief your pastor on a few habits that help the translation.
- 06Make the QR code easy to find
Put it on the screens before the service, on a sign at the welcome center and in the bulletin or church app. Ask a greeter to help first-time listeners.
- 07Broadcast and listen along
Start the broadcast a few minutes early. Watch the input meter, and during the first service, listen on your own phone for a while.
- 08Review and adjust
Read the transcript in the service history, fix obvious mistakes and ask listeners how it went. Small changes in sound and pacing make a real difference by week three.
For a detailed timeline, use the first-service checklist.
What equipment you need
Less than most churches expect. You need a laptop or phone with a current browser, a reliable internet connection at the church, and a way to get the speaker's voice into that device. You do not need receivers, headsets, an interpreter booth or a separate transmitter. Listeners bring their own phones; earbuds or headphones are recommended so the translation does not bother the people next to them.
Audio quality matters more than anything else. A clean feed from the sound board gives the best results. A laptop microphone at the back of a sanctuary with hard walls and a loud HVAC system gives the worst. Many US churches already run a separate mix for the livestream, and that mix, or a dedicated aux send with only the spoken microphones, is often the quickest route to good translation.
Choosing your languages
Start with the people who are actually in your services, or whom you are actively inviting. In Texas, Florida or Southern California that is often Spanish. A church near a refugee resettlement office may need Ukrainian, Arabic or French for families from Central Africa. Korean-American congregations often go the other way, translating a Korean service into English for their children and visitors. A campus church might switch on Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese for international students.
You can offer many languages at once without the cost growing out of control, because a language only uses credits while someone is actually listening to it. Some less widely spoken languages carry a Beta label, such as Amharic, Burmese and Khmer; test those with a native speaker before you rely on them. A few languages are not available at all, including Tigrinya, Somali, Haitian Creole and Kurdish. If one of those is your main need, a human interpreter or a bilingual friend is still the answer for now. The language pages go into the details.
What it costs
ChurchTranslate works with credits: 1 credit is 1 minute of translation into 1 language, and every language has unlimited listeners at no extra cost. A 120-minute service translated into Spanish, Korean and Ukrainian uses 3 × 120 = 360 credits, whether three or three hundred people listen. Churches in the US pay in dollars: plans start at $65 a month for 480 credits (Lite), which covers four two-hour services in one language. The costs guide has worked examples for different kinds of churches, and current plans are on the pricing page.
Privacy and what to tell your congregation
Translating a sermon means sending the speaker's voice to a translation service. ChurchTranslate streams the audio over LiveKit, a real-time audio platform, to Google's Gemini API on the paid tier, which recognizes, translates and voices the speech. Requests on that paid API are not used to train Google's models, though Google may keep them briefly for abuse monitoring. Processing can happen in data centers around the world. No audio recordings are stored. The text transcript of each service goes into your church's own archive, which your church manages and can correct.
A short line in the bulletin is usually enough: the sermon is translated live by AI for visitors who speak other languages, no recordings are kept, and the transcript stays with the church. Listeners who ask for the transcript by email give their address for that purpose only; it is deleted after 30 days.
Accuracy, Bible names and church vocabulary
AI translation follows the flow of a sermon well, and prayers, Scripture readings and announcements generally come through clearly. The hardest parts are names (Nebuchadnezzar, Zerubbabel), places, theological terms and inside jokes. ChurchTranslate keeps Bible names and church terms in mind and corrects known terms in the captions using a terminology list per language, but it is not perfect, and we would rather you hear that from us.
Your pastor can help a lot. Speaking at a steady pace, giving Scripture references in full ("the Gospel of John, chapter three") and briefly explaining words like sanctification or covenant all make the translation clearer, and often help native English speakers too.
Helping listeners on Sunday
Most visitors figure it out once they see the QR code, but a short explanation helps: scan, choose your language, put in an earbud. Older visitors may appreciate a greeter sitting with them for a minute. Some prefer captions only, so they can still hear the pastor's voice in the room. After the service, listeners can request the transcript by email in their language, which is helpful for people who want to reread the sermon or share it with family.
Our listener guide is written in simple English that you can text to visitors or read aloud with them. For the wider question of how translation fits a congregation with several languages, see bilingual and multilingual churches.
Mistakes we see churches make
- Launching on Easter Sunday. Your first translated service should be an ordinary Sunday or a midweek service, not your biggest day of the year.
- Using the laptop's built-in mic. It hears the room, the congregation and the echo. Use a feed from the board whenever you can.
- Hiding the QR code. If people have to ask for it, many never will. Put it on the screens and at the welcome center.
- Relying on one volunteer. When your only trained tech is on vacation, translation stops. Invite at least one more person to the team.
- Forgetting the speaker language. When a guest pastor preaches in Spanish or Portuguese, someone has to tap the switch.
- Never asking listeners. They know whether the volume was too low or the delay felt long. Ask them after the service.
Beyond Sunday morning
Once your setup works, it is easy to use it elsewhere: weddings, baptisms and funerals with relatives from abroad, conferences, camps and events, a guest speaker from a partner church overseas, or a midweek prayer meeting. For one-on-one conversations outside the service, like a coffee after church with a new family, the separate Direct translate tool translates speech through your own phone or laptop microphone in the browser.
And if you are a church of eighty people with one Spanish-speaking family, this is for you too. One language on the Lite plan is enough; see the small church for a realistic example.
Your next step
You now have the full picture. The quickest next step is to sign up and run the free trial with two phones in your building. From there, the audio setup guide and the checklist will get you to your first translated Sunday.