In 1928 Turkish stopped being written in the Perso-Arabic script and started being written in a Latin one, and the change went through in a matter of years rather than generations. Almost overnight, everything printed before became something you needed training to read. A language that has done that thinks about its own vocabulary differently, and so do the people who preach in it.
The alphabet change was fast and it was thorough. What it bought was a script that fits the sounds of Turkish very neatly. What it cost was that a young reader could no longer pick up their grandfather's books.
A second reform followed on vocabulary. A large number of Arabic and Persian words in circulation were replaced with Turkish coinages, so the distance between a speech from the 1920s and a conversation today is wider than a century usually makes it.
The result is a language with an unusually short written memory and an unusually clear relationship to its own words. Turkish speakers are used to the idea that a word can be chosen rather than inherited. That is worth knowing before you look at how Turkish Christians talk about God.
Two of these are typography. The third one is the reason live translation into Turkish is harder than it looks.
Turkish has two separate letters, i and ı, with two separate capitals, İ and I. They are different letters, not styling. Software that lowercases text carelessly turns one into the other and produces a word nobody wrote.
Turkish builds meaning by chaining suffixes onto a stem, so what English needs a clause for, Turkish can do in one word. Captions need room to breathe and a line break in a sensible place, which is a real design constraint on a projector.
In a Turkish sentence the main verb comes at the end. A tool emitting words as they arrive genuinely cannot know what is being asserted until the speaker finishes. Working from the meaning of the whole sentence is not a refinement here. It is the only thing that works.
More on why whole sentences beat running words: Smart Translation.
Unedited output from the same path a live room uses, translating from Danish. Read by someone before it was allowed onto this page.
Your speaker says, in Danish: Lad os ikke gå over åen efter vand. Svaret står lige her i teksten.
The Danish means do not make this more complicated than it needs to be. A substitution engine keeps the stream and the errand and hands your guest a picture with no point to it.
Su için dereyi geçmeyelim.
Here it kept the image, because Turkish will carry it. That is the judgement a good interpreter makes and a lookup table cannot: keep the picture where the language has room for it, drop it where it would only confuse.
And the one that catches everybody: Omskærelsen er ikke den ydre på kroppen, men hjertets omskærelse ved Ånden.
In Romans chapter two this is a figure about the heart, not a description of surgery. An engine with no idea which book it is in reads the plain sense and sends a sentence about an operation.
Sünnet bedende sadece bedendeki dış olan değildir, asıl olan Ruh aracılığıyla yüreğin sünnetidir.
It held the figure: the outward thing set against the circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit. The sense of the passage survives, which is the only thing a listener actually needs.
This is the part that no general purpose tool gets right by accident, because the ordinary Turkish word and the church's Turkish word are often not the same word.
Turkish has more than one word for God, and the most frequent one in everyday text carries a specific religious weight. A tool trained on general Turkish reaches for whatever is commonest and hands a congregation vocabulary from a tradition that is not theirs.
Turkish Protestant usage generally says Tanrı for God and Rab for Lord, Kutsal Ruh for the Holy Spirit, and lütuf for grace, which is not the word a dictionary offers first. In the lines above the system reached for lütuf and for Tanrı without being told to.
And one word that is genuinely double-edged. The Turkish word for circumcision, sünnet, is also the word for the Islamic tradition of the Prophet's practice. It is the correct word in Romans and it is unavoidable, but a Turkish listener hears both senses at once. That is not a translation failure. It is the language, and a preacher who knows it is coming can say a sentence about it.
Words that must never be guessed at, your people's names, your fellowship's name, your own vocabulary, belong in Keywords. They pass through untouched into every language in the room.
English has a four hundred year old translation everybody half remembers. Turkish does not, and the alphabet change is the reason.
The older Turkish Bible, known as Kitab-ı Mukaddes, belongs to the world before the reform, and modern Turkish translations sit on the other side of it. Whichever a congregation reads, it is in a language a person on the street would recognise. There is no equivalent of thee and thou to reach for.
That is a gift to live translation. The register the Bible sets in Turkish is close to the register of ordinary careful speech, so a sentence that sounds natural also sounds scriptural. In several other languages those two pull hard against each other.
Congregations do differ on which translation they read from, and the vocabulary differs a little between them. If your church has a settled preference, put its distinctive terms in Keywords and every language in the room will follow yours instead of a general one.
The pastoral part. Worth five minutes of thought before the first Sunday.
Turkish-speaking Christians are a small minority, and a good number of them came to faith as adults. For some, being visibly identified as part of a church has consequences at home, at work or with family still in another country. Discretion is not paranoia here. It is ordinary care.
And do not assume Turkish from a passport. Somebody who came from Turkey may be most at home in Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian or Syriac, and Turkish may be their public language rather than their family one. Ask which language they would rather listen in, and take the answer at face value.
All three directions, and the listener screen is published in Turkish as well.
Yes. A Turkish-speaking preacher can lead and the whole room follows in its own languages, with no interpreter standing beside them.
Yes, on a phone or on the big screen. Turkish diacritics render properly, including the dotted and dotless i, which is not something every caption system gets right.
Yes, in one earphone, so your guest keeps the other ear on the room. More than one voice to choose from.
In the unedited output on this page it used Tanrı, which is the usual Protestant Turkish choice. If your congregation has settled on particular terms, add them in Keywords and they are used every time rather than left to judgement.
Ask them which language they want to listen in, then run that one alongside Turkish. Several languages at once costs the same as one, so you never have to make somebody choose the language that is merely closest.
Turkish words run long, so give the caption band more height than you would for English and let it wrap. MulingDisplay handles the wrapping; you just need to not squeeze it into a thin strip at the bottom.
No, unless you have deliberately turned recording on for that room. For a congregation where discretion matters this is worth knowing precisely, so the security page sets out exactly what is stored and for how long.
Every one of these can run at the same time in the same service, and adding a language never changes the price.
Or open the full list of 183 and check the three columns for the languages your room needs.
Nothing to install, no card, and no equipment beyond the phones already in the room.