Yesterday we held our Christmas service and invited people from all our different language services to come and join in. The journey of learning to worship together is one of constant adjustments, iterations and development. It is always a work in progress. With that in mind you should take the following not as a finished product but as a point in development.

The Christmas service lends itself quite well to multiple languages as a lot of material may already have been translated and, at least for us, it tends to consist of a lot of prepared prayers, songs and readings. This has lots of advantages because material can be read on the screen or given to the interpreters in advance, giving them help if needed. In a more informal service the challenge for the interpreters goes up a few notches as there may be more spontaneous contributions.

Translation

I know that translation & interpretation can be interchangeable but in this article I’m using translation to refer to written communication and interpretation to refer to spoken communication. So let’s start with translation. We translated Bible readings, prayers & songs.

The Bible readings are the easiest to provide to people thanks to the amazing work of Bible translators. For the songs and prayers we relied on Google Translate. To improve this in the future with human editing we will need to be a lot more organised and have this planned much further in advance. That provides its own challenges. As it is we ran to 105 slides for an hour long service!

When we had a reading we had the translation up on the screen with the speaker’s language at the top and rotating through the others like this.

When we had a prayer it looked like this:

And when we had a song it looked like this. We generally weren’t expecting people to try to sing along in a language they didn’t know and we’ll work on learning songs but that requires a whole other set of solutions.

Interpretation

This is the biggest area and the most significant issue to resolve. We made a decision to do just one way interpretation. Despite the fact that we are in Sweden, English is our most widely understood language and so we took the pragmatic decision to make that our main language and only provide interpret from English. There is a case to run it in Swedish or some mix of Swedish & English but we need to walk before we can run.

This massively simplified things for us and for the interpreters. It meant less mental load and switching and meant we could run the service with 3 interpreters and because we had 4 different languages we also knew we were missing some connections. Currently we don’t have Arabic to Swahili or vice versa and we have varying levels of competency between Swedish → Arabic/Swahili and even less in reverse.

English → Swedish	English → Swahili	English → Arabic
Swedish → English	Swedish → Swahili	Swedish → Arabic
Swahili → English	Swahili → Swedish	Swahili → Arabic
Arabic → English	Arabic → Swedish	Arabic → Swahili

We could, of course, have paid for professional interpretation but that adds significantly to the financial cost and to the technological and organizational complexity. We kept it in house.

One of the most common ways of doing interpretation is called consecutive interpretation. It’s the sort you’ll probably be most familiar with. The preacher speaks, pauses and then someone standing next to them interprets. This is fine if you’re doing it into just one language. Having tried interpreting into two languages I can confidently say this is a mess. There’s no flow for the speaker or the congregation and either or both may have forgotten what is going on by the time it comes back to them.

Instead we did simultaneous interpretation. The speaker speaks and interpreters get to work straight away. The key here is for the speaker to speak slowly. Especially as some languages take longer to say some things than others. This is one of those things that you get better at with practice. But even if you think you’re speaking slowly, speak slower, your interpreters will thank you.

This method of interpretation is reliant on technology. You could have people whispering to people in language clusters that sort of works for a few people, it works less well for dozens and dozens of people.

So thanks to the recommendation of Jonathan Downie we used the LiveVoice system. We chose this setup for a few main reasons.

Firstly, it relies on a piece of technology that everyone already has: their phone. This meant we didn’t need to purchase any additional equipment. Not everyone had headphones so there were a few phones stuck to ears but getting or gifting a few people headphones is a minor cost all things considered.

Secondly, Live Voice offers pay as you go services. We weren’t committed to a subscription, and the cost varies according to the number of people needing the service. This flexibility allows us to test, learn, understand, and improve without high up front costs. Recommended.

Thirdly, it’s super easy to setup and use but you do need Wifi so that interpreter and listener are on the same channel.

Apparently the best setup is to have interpretation booths but we’re not the UN and we don’t have access to lots of different rooms. So we put our interpreters up on the balcony. If we didn’t have a balcony then we’d probably space them out in different corners.

What next?

I think it will be developing the ability to interpret to and from the other languages. There’s no reason why the English speakers shouldn’t use their phones and headphones so we can listen to an Arabic speaker preach. Having said that I assume the language we would add next would be Swedish as a main language but it will require some further steps up in language competency.