Live translation for multi-ethnic and international churches

What a multilingual church actually looks like

Picture a church a few blocks from a state university. The pastor preaches in English. In the sanctuary on a typical Sunday: graduate students from China, India and Korea, a Brazilian couple who came for a postdoc, two Ukrainian families, a handful of Spanish-speaking households from the neighborhood, and older members who have attended for forty years. Most of the newcomers speak some English. But following a conversation at the coffee bar is very different from taking in a thirty-five-minute message on Romans 8.

Or picture a church in a fast-growing suburb of Houston, Atlanta or Charlotte where the congregation simply reflects the zip code. Nobody planned a multilingual ministry; it just happened. The pastor knows that a good share of the room is catching maybe half of what is said.

Many churches have tried a volunteer whispering in a back row, or a separate service in a second language. Both can work for one language. Neither scales to five, and both depend on the same few volunteers being there every week.

A Sunday morning with live translation

1. 01
   Before the service

   Someone on the tech team opens the broadcast studio on the booth laptop, which takes a feed from the sound board through a USB audio interface. The level meter shows the pastor's mic. The QR code is on the pre-service slides and on cards in the lobby.

2. 02
   As people arrive

   Regulars scan the code out of habit, pick Español, 한국어, 简体中文 or whichever language they need, and put in one earbud. Greeters show first-time guests how it works.

3. 03
   During worship

   Announcements, Scripture readings, prayers and the sermon come through a few seconds behind the speaker, as a translated voice and as captions. A student who understands English fairly well can turn the audio off and just read along in their own language, or show the original English text next to the translation.

4. 04
   After the service

   Listeners who asked for it get the transcript by email in their language. Your church keeps the text transcript of each service in its own archive.

Choosing your languages

ChurchTranslate translates into 79 languages, and a church can switch on up to 40 of them for visitors to choose from. Listeners search the list by name, so a long list is not a problem for them. A college-town church might turn on Spanish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Portuguese (Brazil) and Arabic. A church in Minneapolis might add Vietnamese and Swahili. A congregation in Northern Virginia might offer Spanish, Persian (Farsi), Amharic and Korean.

A language only uses credits while someone is listening to it. So it is completely reasonable to switch on Tamil for the one family who comes most Sundays. On the weeks they are away, it costs nothing.

When the service itself is bilingual

In many multi-ethnic churches, the service is already partly bilingual: a welcome in English, a prayer in Spanish, a song in Korean, then the sermon in English. The speaker language is set in the church settings and can be switched with one tap during the service. If you know a section is coming in another language, switching is the cleanest way to handle it. Our guide to a bilingual or multilingual church service has ideas for structuring these services.

What to expect from the quality

The translation follows the line of a sermon well and keeps up with normal preaching. Bible names, theological terms and quoted verses are the hardest part. ChurchTranslate keeps Bible names and church vocabulary in mind and corrects known terms in the captions, but it is not perfect. A pastor who speaks clearly, finishes sentences and does not talk over the worship band helps more than anything else.

It also helps to ask a few of your listeners for honest feedback after the first month. A Korean grad student will tell you quickly whether a term sounds odd.

What it costs a multi-ethnic church

A 90-minute service translated into four languages, with listeners on all four the whole time, is 4 × 90 = 360 credits. Four Sundays a month is 1,440 credits. That fits within the Standard plan ($250 a month, 2,400 credits, with a team of several technicians and transcripts by email after every service). In practice, not every language has listeners for the whole service, so real usage is usually lower. See pricing and the cost guide.