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Notes on live translation

Practical ideas, feature deep-dives and real-world use cases for churches, conferences and events running live translation.

Where Live Translation Actually Goes Wrong — and What Fixes It

Machine translation does not fail randomly. It fails in four predictable places, and we measured how much preparation is worth in each.

A single speaker at a lectern is the easy case. Everything interesting happens in the format that is hardest to translate.

You already own the hardware. The question is how to retire it without stranding the people who liked it.

One person has been carrying an entire language for years. Nobody has asked them how it is going.

Consecutive translation doubles the length of everything and halves the attention of everyone. There is a third option.

Twice a year, people walk into your building who will never come back — unless something happens that they were not expecting.

A team flies in for a week. The first two days are usually spent discovering how little can be communicated.

Most of these have answers that are easy to check and awkward to give. That is what makes them useful.

Boards do not reject translation because they are against it. They reject it because nobody put a number and an outcome in front of them.

Greek, English, Russian, Romanian, Filipino, Arabic, Ukrainian — often in one congregation. A specific look at a specific island.