A translation tool sees a word it recognises and finds the nearest one in the other language. That is right for most words and wrong for a name. Keywords are the list of words that must never be guessed: your people, your places, the vocabulary your church uses. Write them once, and every room has them.
Grace stood at the front to read the Scripture. In the translation, she became a theological idea.
It happens more often than anybody notices. Grace, Faith, Joy, Hope, Mark, Christian: ordinary words in English, and somebody's actual name in your congregation. A translation that does not know the difference translates the word and loses the person. The same goes for your church's name, the street it stands on, the village a family came from, and the thing you have called the Thursday meeting for twenty years.
A good translation tries to be helpful. It sees a word it recognises and finds the nearest one in the other language. That is exactly right for most words and exactly wrong for a name.
And names are different from every other word in the sentence. The rest of a translation can be a little imperfect and nobody minds. A name is the one word that is about a person, and getting it wrong is the one mistake people take personally. Somebody following the sermon in their second language hears their own name turned into a common noun, or their home town turned into a description. It is small, and it is not neutral. It says: this room was not really built with you in mind.
Nobody should hear their own name mangled in front of a room.
On 17 February 2026 we released Keywords. A keyword is a word that MulingStream must catch correctly when it is spoken and carry through intact into every language in the room. You write the list, and the translation stops guessing.
There are two kinds of list:
Organisation keywords belong to your whole account. Write them once, and every room you use already has them: your church, your building, your leaders, the words you say every week. Room keywords belong to one room, for the visiting speaker, the conference, the one-off event.
Read more on the Keywords page.
Each keyword has three small parts, and most of the time you only fill in the first.
The word itself. This is what your audience sees in the live text and in the translation. In most cases that is all you need: names are recognised from their spelling.
How it sounds, when that is different. A name like Siobhan is said nothing like it is written, and a word with silent letters, or a foreign name said by a Danish speaker, can trip up the recognition. For those, add how it sounds, and MulingStream listens for that sound and writes the word the way you spelled it.
Whether it may be translated. Most keywords should not be. If your church is called Living Water, you probably do not want it turned into the words for living water in Persian. For names, brands and the terms that belong to you, leave translate off. For an ordinary term that you only want caught correctly, switch it on.
Anything that would sting if it came out wrong. If you are unsure, add it: a keyword that never comes up costs nothing.
Scripture references belong here too, so they arrive as references and not as ordinary words that happen to look like them. And if your community drops words from another language into the middle of English sentences, those are exactly the words that need protecting.
You do not have to think of everything at once. Add the leadership team, the building and the two or three things you say every week, and add the rest as they come up. One list protects those words in every language the room is running, including the languages written right to left.
We did not build Keywords because names are a hard technical problem. We built them because of the person in the third row who hears the sentence around their name translated properly, and their name in the middle of it still their own. That is what being welcomed sounds like when you cannot follow the room.
Since 2 April 2026, Keywords are part of every session, with nothing extra to switch on and nothing added to what a session costs. On the same day we released Context Enhancer, which lets you paste your sermon notes the day before. The two work together: the notes tell the translation what today is about, and the keywords hold the words that must never move.
Keywords work alongside Smart Translation, which builds whole sentences from meaning, and Smart Hints, which explain the verse or the saying that would not travel on its own. All of them are included, in 200+ languages. See the full list of languages.
Write down the ten words that matter most to your church, and we show you the whole thing live with them, in about fifteen minutes. Nothing is decided on the call and nothing follows it: you see it, and then you are the judge.