Two or three times a year your building fills with people who are not usually there. Some are visiting family. Some are tourists. Some have not been inside a church in a decade and have arrived because it is Christmas and their mother asked.
A meaningful number of them do not speak the language you are about to use for the next hour.
Why these services are worth more than the others
On an ordinary Sunday, the people who do not understand mostly stayed home. At Christmas they came anyway, because the occasion pulled them harder than the language pushed them away.
This is the largest audience of newcomers you will get all year, and the only one where language is the sole barrier between them and the whole thing. They are already in the building. They have already decided to come. Everything else has been solved except the one hour in the middle.
If you are going to spend money on translation for a limited number of hours, these are the hours.
The specific problem with these services
Festival services are harder to follow than normal ones, not easier — which is the opposite of what most churches assume.
They are dense with material a regular attender knows by heart and a stranger has never heard: old carols in older language, readings in translations chosen for beauty rather than clarity, responses that everyone else says automatically without being told to. Add the archaic vocabulary of a King James reading or a Victorian carol and you have text that a fluent second-language speaker will struggle with, let alone a beginner.
A visitor with limited language is not slightly behind at these services. They are lost from the first line, and they know it, and they spend the hour looking at the back of someone's head.
Prepare the things that repeat
Here is the advantage these services have over every other one: you know what is in them, weeks ahead.
The readings are fixed. The carols are chosen. The names, the places, the liturgy — all of it is known in advance, which is true of almost nothing else in church life. That means the difficult parts can be prepared rather than improvised.
- Give the system your proper nouns. The place names, the names in the readings, the title of every carol. On difficult audio a supplied vocabulary list makes a measurable difference, and a full church at Christmas is difficult audio by definition.
- Prepare the carols as text. Sung words translate badly in real time — melody stretches vowels, the congregation sings along, and the result is worse than nothing. Prepared lyrics are accurate and can be checked by somebody who speaks the language.
- Have the readings ready. If you use a fixed lectionary passage, a good translation of it exists already and does not need to be improvised at speed.
Plan for the room being full
Two practical things that only bite at Christmas.
Your network. Two hundred phones is not the same as forty. If people will use your Wi-Fi, check how many devices your access points actually handle — this is the limit that fails first, and it fails on the one Sunday you cannot afford it.
Your concurrent listener limit, if your provider has one. Find out the number before December rather than discovering it at 11:20 on Christmas morning.
And the overflow room, the crèche and the corridor all need the code too. At a full festival service those rooms hold the families with small children — the most likely group to need it and the least able to come and ask.
Make it findable without anyone asking
A visitor who does not speak your language will not approach a stranger to ask for help. That is the entire design constraint, and everything follows from it.
- Put the code on the order of service, on the door, and on the screen before it starts.
- Put one line beside it in the three languages you most expect — not only in yours. A reader scanning a page recognises their own script instantly and reads nothing else until they find it.
- Say it out loud in the welcome, slowly, once.
- Have someone at the door who can point at the code and smile, which requires no shared language at all.
Print more cards than you think you need. The one thing you cannot do on Christmas morning is print more.
The follow-up matters more than the service
A visitor who understood the Christmas service is a person who might come back in January. A visitor who did not is a person who has now confirmed that this is not for them.
Give them something to leave with in their own language: the address, the times, a page they can read at home. A page a visitor can read before they arrive is worth more in the last week of December than in any other month of the year.
And keep the transcript of the talk if it is suitable — a visitor who half-followed it can read the rest that evening, in their own language, which is a far better invitation than anything you could hand them at the door.
Do it once, honestly
Do not attempt this for the first time on Christmas Eve. Run it at an ordinary service in November, find out what is wrong with your audio, fix it, and arrive at the festival services with something you have already seen work.
Metered hours suit this exactly
If you only want translation for the services that need it, pay for those hours and nothing else. InMyTongue meters by the hour with free credit on new accounts. Set it up before the season.