Ask around and you will hear that live translation needs a small fortune in gear: transmitters, receivers, booths, headsets, a technician to run it all. That was true once. Today the honest answer is much shorter — and much cheaper.
What you genuinely need
- A device you already own. A laptop, tablet, or phone with a browser is enough to run the broadcast.
- Clean audio of the speaker. This is the one place worth a little care. Pulling the speaker's voice from your sound mixer — rather than a microphone across the room — is the difference between accurate subtitles and guesswork.
- Wi-Fi or mobile data for the broadcasting device and for attendees' phones.
What you do not need
- Receiver headsets. Attendees use their own phones, so there is nothing to buy, charge, sanitise, or replace.
- Interpreter booths. No soundproof boxes, no floor space, no rental.
- A dedicated technician. If you can start a video call, you can start a translated broadcast.
The one upgrade worth considering
If there is a single thing to spend money on, it is audio capture. A simple USB audio interface that takes a feed from your mixer costs little and improves accuracy dramatically, because the system hears the speaker directly instead of through room echo and congregation noise. Everything downstream — transcription, translation, subtitles — gets better when the input is clean.
Why the old model persisted
For years the hardware model was the only option, so churches assumed the cost was unavoidable. It no longer is. Before you price up receivers and booths, it is worth checking whether the phones already in the room can do the job — because, increasingly, they can.
Try it at your next service
InMyTongue streams live subtitles and spoken translation to every attendee's phone — in the language they choose — straight from a browser, with nothing to install. New accounts start with free credit, and no card is needed to try it. See how it works.