Every other page in this section shows you real sentences from the real system. This one does not, and the reason is simple. We ran Tigrinya through the same test as everything else, read the results with the words a church actually uses in mind, and they were not good enough to put in front of a pastor. So we are telling you instead of showing you something flattering.
Three separate limits, and it is worth keeping them apart, because they are not the same problem and they will not be solved at the same time.
MulingStream cannot yet listen to a talk given in Tigrinya. If your Tigrinya speaking pastor preaches in Tigrinya, the room cannot follow him through us. Catching live speech in a real room is the hardest of the three things we do, and Tigrinya is not on that list yet.
Captions in Tigrinya work today, in the Ge'ez script, on a phone or on the big screen. This is the one direction that is technically available. Whether you should use it is the next section, and the honest answer has conditions on it.
No Tigrinya audio, so nobody can close their eyes and listen. That matters more than it sounds. It rules out anybody who reads slowly, anybody without their glasses, and anybody who would rather watch the person speaking than a screen.
And the fourth limit, which is the real one. The translation itself is not yet where we want it. In our own testing, a central term from Romans came back as an ordinary word with nothing to do with the passage. Not a clumsy rendering: a different word entirely. That is the worst kind of error, because nobody in your room would correct it. They would assume the machine knew what it was doing, and they would be sitting with a sentence that says something we never said.
We would rather lose the sale than have a congregation read something wrong about grace in their own language and never know.
Tigrinya is written in the Ge'ez script, which it shares with Amharic and with the liturgy of the Orthodox Tewahedo churches. It is one of the few writing systems in the world that was invented in Africa and is still in daily use.
Amharic uses the same script and is a different language. If your church has both communities, read the Amharic page as well, because it carries the same warning for a different reason.
Understanding this makes the vocabulary problem above make sense, rather than sounding like an excuse.
Tigrinya comes down from Ge'ez, the ancient language of the Aksumite kingdom, alongside Tigre and more distantly Amharic. Ge'ez itself stopped being an everyday language a very long time ago and never stopped being a church language. It is still what the Orthodox Tewahedo liturgy is sung in.
It is a relative of Arabic and Hebrew, which surprises people who expect African languages to be one thing. Words are built from roots with vowels threaded through them, which is part of why a translation engine that has not seen much Tigrinya produces confident nonsense: it can assemble a plausible looking word that no one uses.
Ge'ez carried the writing for centuries while Tigrinya carried the speaking. A substantial written Tigrinya literature is much more recent than the script it is written in, and there is far less Tigrinya text in the world than there is Danish. Translation systems are built from text, and that shortage is precisely why the quality is where it is.
Tigrinya is spoken in Eritrea and in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia. There are differences in vocabulary between them, and speakers notice which one they are reading. It is one language and it is not one community, and a church should not assume otherwise.
This is where a translation is judged, and it is where ours is currently found wanting.
There is a full Bible in Tigrinya and congregations read it. Behind it stands the Ge'ez scriptural tradition, which is one of the oldest continuous ones anywhere, and which decides what a verse is supposed to sound like. A Tigrinya speaking believer hearing a familiar passage knows within a few words whether the wording is right.
That is exactly the bar our translation does not clear yet. The words a church uses for grace, for the Spirit, for salvation and for the older figures in Paul's letters are specific, settled, and different from the everyday words that mean roughly the same thing. A system trained on general text reaches for the everyday word, and produces a sentence that is grammatical, confident and wrong in the one place it matters.
Fixing that is not a matter of turning something up. It is a matter of getting the church vocabulary of Tigrinya written down correctly by people who own it, and then holding the translation to it.
Eritrean and Tigrayan congregations are a real presence in Nordic and European churches, and one of the least served by anything built for churches.
Many arrived young and alone. Many have been here for years, work full time, and have never once had a service in their own language within reach of where they live. Some belong to Orthodox Tewahedo tradition and some to Protestant and Pentecostal congregations, and the two do not use identical vocabulary.
Where there is a Tigrinya speaking congregation nearby, it is often meeting in a borrowed hall on a weekday evening, entirely run by volunteers, with no budget and no software. Where there is not, people simply attend a local church and follow as best they can for an hour a week, every week, for years.
That is the group this page is about, and it is why we are not willing to hand them a demonstration that looks impressive and falls apart on a verse. Getting this right is worth doing properly.
No dates. We are not going to promise you a month and then quietly move it. This is the order of work, and this page will change when the work is done.
Not a linguist in the abstract: somebody who is in a Tigrinya speaking congregation and knows which word the room uses for grace, for the Spirit, for baptism, for salvation, and for the passages that come up most. That list, written down and correct, is the foundation for everything else.
Once the vocabulary is checked, it stops being something the system decides sentence by sentence. It becomes fixed, the same way your church's own names and terms are fixed today through Keywords. That single step removes the entire class of error described further up this page.
So that a Tigrinya speaking pastor can preach in Tigrinya and the rest of the room can follow him. This is genuinely intended. It depends on things that are not entirely in our hands, which is exactly why there is no date beside it.
Not any voice: one somebody can listen to for a full hour without it becoming work. A bad voice is worse than no voice, because people try it once and never come back. When there is one good enough, Tigrinya gets it.
When this is fixed, this page will say so. The honest section will come down and real sentences will go up in its place, the way they are on the other language pages. Until then, what you have read here is where it actually stands.
Because captions do work, and because for some rooms a rough caption is genuinely better than nothing, as long as everybody knows what they have. What we are not willing to do is put it on the list and let you assume it is as good as the languages that are. That is what this page exists to prevent.
Not yet, and this is the limit worth knowing before you plan anything around it. MulingStream cannot listen to a talk given in Tigrinya. If your service is in Danish or English and the Tigrinya speakers are the ones following, that direction works today. The other direction does not.
Only if the person actually reads it comfortably, and you should ask rather than assume, because for some people it is not a neutral substitution. The Amharic page carries its own honest warning: we are not satisfied with the quality there either, for a different and equally serious reason.
Tell us when it is wrong, and tell us what it should have said. If you have a member who would go through a list of church words in Tigrinya with us, that is the single most useful thing anybody could offer, and it is the thing standing between this page and a much better one. Get in touch.
The neighbouring language, and what the other pages look like when we are confident.
The same script, one of the oldest Christian traditions anywhere, and the same honest warning about quality for a different reason.
Read comfortably by a good number of Eritreans, and a language where we do show you real sentences because we are confident in them.
What each one can do: spoken from the stage, read as captions, heard as a voice. Three different questions with three different answers.
What a guest actually does: open a link, choose a language, put one earbud in. No account, no app to install, nothing to hand back.
Not to sell you anything. To get the words right, from somebody who knows them, so that this page can eventually say something better.