Hindi and Urdu grew from the same speech and still share most of a conversation. What separates them is the writing and the high vocabulary: one draws its serious words from Sanskrit, the other from Persian and Arabic. Preaching runs almost entirely on serious words, which is why a church cannot treat the two as interchangeable even though the market outside can.
Both standards grew out of the speech around Delhi. For everyday purposes they never really separated: word order, grammar and the vocabulary of ordinary life are held in common.
The separation happened above that, in writing and in the formal register, as two literary traditions were deliberately developed in two scripts with two sets of borrowed vocabulary. It was a project rather than an accident, and it succeeded.
So the further a sentence gets from the kitchen table, the further apart the two become. A conversation about the weather is one language. A sentence about grace, salvation and the Spirit is two.
That is a linguistic fact rather than a political one, and this page treats it as such. What it means for you is simple: ask each guest which one they read, and run both if you are not sure.
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: Men der er ingen ko på isen. Vi når det, vi skal.
The Danish means there is nothing to worry about. Read literally it is a sentence about livestock on a frozen lake. A substitution engine keeps the cow, and your guest spends the next minute wondering what they missed instead of listening to the next thing you said.
लेकिन बिल्कुल चिंता की कोई बात नहीं है।
No cow, no ice, and no puzzle. Just the ordinary Hindi way of saying there is absolutely nothing here to worry about, in the register somebody would use out loud from the front of a room.
And here is the pair, from the same run: Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
तुम अनुग्रह से विश्वास के द्वारा उद्धार पाए हो। यह तुम्हारी ओर से नहीं, यह परमेश्वर का वरदान है।
Anugrah for grace, vishwas for faith, uddhar for salvation, Parmeshwar for God, vardan for the gift. Sanskrit-derived throughout, and every one of them is the word a Hindi-speaking congregation expects.
تم ایمان کے وسیلے سے فضل سے نجات پائے ہو۔ یہ تمہاری طرف سے نہیں، یہ خدا کی بخشش ہے۔
Fazl, iman, najat, Khuda, bakhshish. Persian and Arabic throughout. Two sentences with the same meaning and the same shape, built from two entirely different sets of words. The Urdu page works through it from the other side.
Produced with no preparation and no glossary. Share your outline beforehand with Context Enhancer and the service starts with your passage and your names already known.
Devanagari hangs its letters from a horizontal bar, and the bar runs continuously across a whole word. It is how you recognise the script from the other side of a room, and it is also what makes it legible at speed.
Consonants combine into joined forms when they meet, so a Hindi word can be visually denser than its length suggests, and vowel marks sit above and below the line as well as beside it. Captions therefore want line spacing rather than a tight band, or the marks on one line start colliding with the next.
The good news is that Devanagari renders reliably nearly everywhere, on phones and projectors alike, with no configuration and no special font hunting. It runs left to right, so it needs nothing unusual from your slide layout either.
One useful side effect: the same script carries Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit. A guest who reads Nepali can read Hindi letters, even where the words are unfamiliar.
All three directions, and the listener screen is published in Hindi as well.
Yes. A Hindi-speaking preacher can lead and the whole room follows in its own languages, with nobody standing beside them repeating each sentence.
Yes, on a phone or the big screen, in Devanagari, left to right. It needs nothing special from your projector beyond a little vertical room.
Yes, male or female, in one earphone. Your guest keeps the other ear on the singing and on the person next to them.
Your guest opens the listener screen with a phone camera, and that screen is already in Hindi. This is what they see.
This is the structural reason a word by word tool cannot do Hindi well, and it has nothing to do with vocabulary.
English has one word for you and no obligation to decide anything about the relationship before using it. Word order puts the verb early, so a listener knows what is being claimed almost immediately.
Hindi has three ways of saying you, and picking one is a statement about who you are to the person you are addressing. There is no neutral option. The verb also lands at the end of the sentence, so nothing can be finalised until the speaker has finished.
In the lines above it chose tum, the middle level: warmer than the most formal address, respectful in a way the most intimate one is not. That is exactly the choice a preacher makes when speaking to a congregation, and it had to be made before a single word could be produced.
Why whole sentences beat a stream of words: Smart Translation.
Good for a conversation over coffee after the service.
Shampoo, jungle, bungalow and pyjamas all came into English from this language. A European congregation is already using its vocabulary without knowing where it came from.
Listen to two people chatting and you often cannot say which of the two languages it is. The question only becomes answerable when somebody writes it down, or reaches for a formal word.
Devanagari is not only Hindi's. Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit use it too, which is why a Nepali speaker can often read a Hindi caption aloud even where the meaning escapes them.
Three small things, and none of them needs a meeting beforehand.
Put the same short line in Devanagari and in Nastaliq on one card by the door. A guest points at the one that looks like home. It settles in three seconds a question that is awkward to ask out loud.
Adding a second language does not change what the service costs, so there is no reason to make the card a decision with consequences. Switch both on and let people find their own.
Some guests will read happily. Some would much rather listen and keep their eyes on the front. Offering both at the door means nobody has to explain which they need.
Because the words a sermon is built from are exactly the words that differ. Grace, faith, salvation and God are different in each. The output on this page shows the two side by side, and they share almost nothing but the shape of the sentence.
Often, yes, for the same reason a fluent second-language speaker still prefers their own language when the subject is grief, faith or money. Offer it and let them decide. Nobody is obliged to use a language just because it is on.
Largely, as the unedited lines above show. What it cannot guess is your vocabulary: your people's names, your fellowship's name, the terms your church has settled on. Put those in Keywords and they pass through untouched.
Usually. Accents are expected. If your speaker mixes English and Hindi heavily, which many people do naturally, share your notes beforehand so the vocabulary is already known when the service starts.
All of these can run at the same time in one service. Adding one never changes the price.
Or open the full list of 183 and check what each one can actually do.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guests need nothing but the phone already in their pocket.