When Indonesia settled on a national language, it did not take the biggest one. The largest language in the country by a wide margin was passed over on purpose, and a trade language from the ports was chosen instead: one that belonged to the sea lanes rather than to any one people, so that nobody was being asked to accept somebody else's tongue as the price of belonging. That is not a piece of grammar trivia. It is the exact problem a church faces the first Sunday it has guests.
Most national languages are the language of whoever won. Indonesian is one of the few that was picked precisely so that nobody had won.
The country that became Indonesia held hundreds of languages, several of them large and old, with literatures and courts and centuries of writing behind them. One of those was far bigger than the rest. Choosing it would have been the obvious move, and it would have told every other people in the archipelago exactly where they stood.
So the nationalists chose differently. They took Malay, which had been the working language of the ports for centuries: the language you used with a stranger, on a dock, over a price. It was almost nobody's mother tongue and it was already everybody's second one. They renamed it, standardised it, and built a country on it.
The result is a language that almost every Indonesian speaks fluently and almost none of them learned first. It is the language of school, of the news, of national life. It is very often not the language somebody was sung to sleep in.
That is worth holding onto, because it is the thing most likely to be got wrong about an Indonesian guest in your church. They will speak Indonesian. It does not follow that Indonesian is their heart language.
This is the same decision your church makes every Sunday. Run the service in the majority language and the newcomer is told, politely and without anyone meaning to, that belonging costs a language. Run it in everyone's language at once and nobody pays. Indonesia solved it with a compromise everybody could live with. A century later a congregation can solve it without a compromise at all.
Indonesian has several words for you, and choosing between them is a statement about the relationship.
There is a respectful you that is right for a stranger, a customer or a form. Used across an entire sermon it puts a pane of glass between the preacher and the pew. The words are all correct. The warmth is gone, and the listener notices without being able to say why.
There is a familiar you, and there is the word for brother or sister that Indonesian Christians use to address a room. Our own output below reaches for the familiar form and folds it into the word for effort, exactly as the standard Bible register does. That is a choice about relationship, made before a single noun was translated.
The same question runs through the whole language. Indonesian has an everyday register that drops half the endings and a formal one that keeps them all, and a sermon lives somewhere between the two. Get it wrong in the formal direction and you sound like a government notice. Get it wrong in the other and you sound like somebody who has not understood where they are.
A word for word engine has no way to decide this. Nothing in the Danish tells it whether the speaker is addressing a friend or a ministry. It picks whatever is commonest and then keeps picking it, all service long.
Danish in, Indonesian out, through the same path a live room uses. Unedited.
Dan Roh Kudus turun atas mereka semua, dan mereka mulai berbicara dalam bahasa-bahasa lain.
From the Danish Og Ånden faldt over dem alle sammen, og de begyndte at tale på andre sprog.
The Danish word here means spirit, ghost, or a bottle of spirits, depending entirely on where you are. A word for word reading picks the commonest sense and gives you a plain spirit, or worse. The Indonesian says Holy Spirit by name, because the run understood it was in Acts 2, not in a ghost story.
Sebab karena kasih karunia kamu diselamatkan oleh iman. Itu bukan hasil usahamu sendiri, melainkan pemberian Allah.
From the Danish Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
Two things to see. Grace is a settled two word term in Indonesian church language, not the everyday word for mercy, and that is what came out. And the ending on the word for effort is the familiar your, which means the sentence decided it was speaking to a congregation rather than to an audience.
Both produced with no glossary and no warning. Give the service your outline in advance with Context Enhancer and it starts already knowing the passage.
Indonesian Christians have a settled vocabulary, and it is not the vocabulary of a dictionary.
The modern standard translation that most Indonesian Protestant churches read from did what a good Bible always does: it fixed the words. Grace has a form. The Spirit has a form. Salvation has a form. Those forms are what people quote, sing and pray in, and they are not always the commonest words in the language.
You can see it in the output above. The word chosen for grace is the church term, two words that mean something like loving favour, rather than the ordinary word for mercy that a general tool would land on. An Indonesian believer hears the difference in the first second.
One more thing that catches European churches out. Indonesian Christians use the word Allah for God, in their Bibles, their hymns and their prayers. It is simply the Indonesian word, and it has been the Christian word there for a very long time. Nobody in an Indonesian congregation finds it remarkable, and a host church that reacts to it will have said something it did not mean to say.
Three separate questions. Indonesian answers yes to all three.
A visiting Indonesian preacher can preach in Indonesian and the whole room follows in its own languages. One of 81 languages that can be the source.
On a guest's own phone, or on the screen at the front with MulingDisplay. One of 182 languages that can be read.
Four Indonesian voices, so a room can have a man or a woman as it prefers. One of 81 languages that can be listened to.
This website is published in Indonesian as well, which is true of only a minority of the 183 languages we work with. An Indonesian speaker can read the pricing, the help and every page of this site in their own language before they ask you a single question.
The pastoral part, and it follows directly from how the language was chosen.
Assume no warning at all. This still works.
One question at the door: which language would you rather listen in. Indonesian, Malay, English and something else entirely are all plausible answers from the same person. Only they know.
They point a phone camera at your code and pick their language. Nothing to install, no account, no sign up. It takes about as long as finding a hymn number.
Keep a basket of cheap wired earphones by the door. It is the single most useful thing a welcoming team can own, and it turns reading a screen for forty minutes into simply listening.
Mention on the sheet or at the door that the service is available in other languages. Never name a person or a language from the platform. The point is that they can follow, not that they are being accommodated.
Same root, two standards, and the differences are real enough that a speaker of one can hear when they are being handed the other. Indonesian and Malay are listed separately here for that reason. There is a whole page on where the line falls: see Malay.
Check the list. Javanese and several other languages of the archipelago are not in it yet, and where a language is missing we would rather you knew before Sunday than after. If a language your congregation actually needs is absent, tell us, because that is how the list changes.
It aims at the register a sermon lives in rather than the register of a form, and the output above shows it choosing the familiar form of you unprompted. If your congregation has a settled way of addressing each other, put those words in Keywords and they will be used exactly.
Yes. Indonesian can be the language coming off the stage as well as one of the languages in the pews, so a visiting preacher does not have to switch to English to be understood by everybody else.
All of these can run in the same service at once. The number of languages is not a price lever here.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket.