There are two separate settings, and mixing them up is the usual cause of "the translation is not working".
| Setting | What it means |
|---|---|
| Which language is spoken at the front? | The language being spoken in the room. It tells the system what it is listening to. |
| Which languages should people be able to follow? | The languages captions are translated into, for people reading along. |
| When the speaker switches language, how should captions follow? | Only shown when two languages are spoken at the front. How captions keep up when the speaker changes language. |
- Open Live Translation, go to the Settings tab and choose Languages.
- Under Which language is spoken at the front?, check the Main language and change it if needed to what will actually be said from the front. If your speakers switch between two languages, add the second with Add a spoken language….
- Under Which languages should people be able to follow?, click Add a language… for each language you want to translate into.
- Changes save on their own. Changing the spoken language during a service restarts the captions, so you are asked to confirm first.
- To test, go live for a minute and check each language appears, then end the session.
Choosing which languages to offer
- Add the languages your congregation actually reads, not every language you might one day want.
- Each language uses 1 hour of your translation time for every hour of service, so two languages use it twice as fast as one — and each is one more thing to check before a service.
- You can follow up to 3 languages at once. If you need more, contact SYNAI.
- With more than one language, the first one in the list is Primary and runs all service. If SYNAI has turned on listener-driven languages for your church, each other language can be Always on or When listeners join; the second only runs, and only uses translation time, while someone is reading or listening to it.
- With two spoken languages, choose how captions follow the speaker. Bundle (recommended) follows whichever of the two is being spoken, for 1 hour of translation time per hour. One direction at a time also uses 1 hour per hour, and the operator presses Swap on the Console when the language changes; it is offered only when no other language is followed. Dedicated keeps a separate translation into each language running, for 2 hours per hour. Changing this restarts a running service.
- Ask the people who will use it. Churches are regularly surprised by which language is genuinely needed.
Supported languages
Live Translation supports 60 languages. Any of them can be the spoken language, any of them can be a translation language, and translated voice speaks all of them:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese and Welsh.
- Serbian and Bosnian captions are written in Latin script, Kazakh in Cyrillic, and Chinese in Simplified characters.
- A language that is not on this list cannot be added. If your congregation needs one, tell us which.