On Sunday 7 June, Åbenkirke Odense switched on MulingStream for its service. This is what a Sunday there looks like for someone who does not speak Danish, and, added in September, what the lead pastor told us about it in his own words.
On Sunday 7 June, Åbenkirke Odense switched on MulingStream for its Sunday service.
Åbenkirke is a church in Odense, on Funen, and like most churches in Denmark it preaches in Danish. Like many city churches, it also has people in the room who did not grow up with Danish: students, families who moved for work, visitors passing through. Most of them can order a coffee in Danish. Following a forty minute sermon, with its stories, its quotations and its jokes, is something else.
We are telling this story a few days after that first Sunday, because a first Sunday is where every church starts, and because we would like you to see what it looks like from a seat in the room.
Ask a pastor in Denmark how the church serves the people who do not understand Danish, and you hear a short list. Sometimes a member who speaks English sits next to the guest and whispers. Sometimes there is an interpreter, when one can be found. Sometimes the slides carry a few lines in English. Very often the guest simply sits through it, smiles at the end, and decides quietly whether to come back.
None of these is wrong, and all of them are built on generous people. But each covers one language at best, and none of them carries the whole message to the guest from Ukraine, the student from the Netherlands and the family from Iran on the same morning.
Nothing that marks them out. There is nothing to collect at the door and nothing to install. The guest uses the phone already in their pocket.
From that moment the sermon arrives on their screen in their own language, as the pastor speaks. They can listen with their own earbuds, or read the translation as text, which also serves anyone who is hard of hearing and anyone who simply reads faster than they listen. More about the guest's side is on how it works for listeners.
A Danish sermon is full of things that do not travel word for word: a saying every Dane knows, a joke that only works in Danish, a verse quoted by its reference alone. Since March, MulingStream has translated the meaning in context rather than word by word with Smart Translation, so a sentence arrives as the speaker meant it.
Where a sentence still would not travel on its own, Smart Hints add a short note underneath it, in the guest's own language: the verse the pastor quoted, from a Bible translation in that language, or the meaning behind a Danish saying. The talk never stops for it.
Very little, which is the point. Someone on the tech team starts the room in the browser on the church computer, with the sound coming from the mixing desk, and presses start when the service begins. The QR code can sit on the screen, in the bulletin or on a card at the welcome table.
Churches that want more can use it. Context Enhancer lets the pastor or the team give MulingStream the sermon notes beforehand, so names and terms are right from the first sentence. Keywords keep a church's own words intact. And MulingDisplay can put the translation on the screen at the front. None of it is required for a first Sunday.
We will not tell you how Åbenkirke's first Sunday went from our side. That belongs to the church, and the people who were in the room. What we can say is that a church in Odense decided its guests should be able to follow the whole service, and on 7 June it made that true.
When the church tells us in its own words what it has meant, we will add it here.
Over the summer, Niels-Peter Hedegaard, lead pastor of Åbenkirke Odense, wrote to us. We asked him what the church did before, when someone in the room did not understand Danish. This is his answer, and he gave us permission to share it.
Before, we had a person who translated live what was being said, and the people who did not speak Danish sat with headphones and listened in. Now we can just switch the translation on, and they can scan a code themselves and get the translation on their own phone.
He also passed on what visitors had told the church. Some came from the Netherlands:
"We have heard from some Dutch visitors that they were really glad they could get the translation in Dutch, because it was not something they were used to being able to get."
And some spoke French:
"We have had really good reviews from some French speaking users over the summer, who were impressed by the translation's ability to even explain Danish wordplay and sayings."
One more sentence from Niels-Peter is about the part of translation we care about most, the moment a saying cannot be carried across word for word:
It was impressive to have a translation that could even follow sayings and Danish expressions that could not be translated directly, because then it came as an explanatory text box [Smart Hints], so you understood everything that was going on anyway.
That is the whole of it, in his words: a guest who would have sat through the service now scans a code and follows it, in Dutch or French or whatever language they brought with them, including the jokes. You can read more from Åbenkirke and other churches on our stories page, and see every language a guest can choose on the languages page.
Pastors, chairmen and guests, in their own words.