Most European languages have spent the last thousand years shedding grammar. Endings wore down, cases collapsed into prepositions, and the work of saying who did what to whom moved into word order. Lithuanian did much less of that. It still runs on endings, and scholars who want to see what this family of languages used to look like reach for Lithuanian, because it is the closest thing to a living answer.
This matters to you for one practical reason. It is the exact feature that makes a cheap translation sound broken, and a Lithuanian speaker will hear it in the first sentence.
Lithuanian belongs to the Baltic branch, which has exactly two living members: Lithuanian and Latvian. Between them they carry a set of grammatical features that Latin had, that Greek had, and that most of their western cousins gave up a long time ago.
In Lithuanian a noun changes its ending depending on the job it is doing in the sentence. There are seven of those jobs. The word for the Spirit is not the same shape when the Spirit is doing something as when something is done through the Spirit. The word for God changes when you speak to God rather than about God.
So word order is loose, because order is not what carries the meaning. Which is fine for a Lithuanian speaker and fatal for a tool that translates one word at a time and then tries to bolt the grammar on afterwards. Every ending it guesses at is a small wrong note, and forty minutes of small wrong notes is very tiring to sit through.
The endings can only be right if the whole sentence is known first. That is not a clever feature. It is the only way Lithuanian works at all.
Three separate questions, and they are worth asking separately, because the answers are not the same for every language on our list. For Lithuanian all three are yes.
Spoken from the stage. A Lithuanian preacher or a Lithuanian testimony reaches the whole room, each person in their own language. One of the 81 languages that can be the source.
Read as captions. On the phone your guest already has, or up on the wall through MulingDisplay.
Heard as a voice. A Lithuanian voice in one earbud, with a man's voice or a woman's voice to suit the room.
Lithuanian sits in the list as lt, its own name Lietuvių, written left to right in the Latin alphabet with its own set of marks. See all 183 languages.
Six Danish lines were run into every language at once, the way a real room runs, with the church setting on. Nothing has been edited since. Three of the Lithuanian ones are below, each with the Danish it came from and what a word for word reading would have produced instead.
The Danish Omskærelsen er ikke den ydre på kroppen, men hjertets omskærelse ved Ånden.
Apipjaustymas nėra tas išorinis kūne, bet širdies apipjaustymas per Dvasią.
Word for word lands on: a surgical procedure, described clinically. The Danish word is the ordinary medical one, and a substitution engine has no reason to look further. What arrived instead is the term Lithuanian Bibles use, kept the same in both halves of the sentence so the contrast Paul is making still stands. Note also that the word for the Spirit changes shape at the end, because here the Spirit is the means and Lithuanian marks that on the noun.
The Danish Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
Jūs esate išgelbėti malone per tikėjimą, ir tai ne iš jūsų, tai yra Dievo dovana.
Word for word lands on: mercy and rescued. Those are the general purpose words, and they are not what a church means. Here grace carries its own ending rather than needing a preposition in front of it, which is the Lithuanian way of saying by grace, and saved is the word used of salvation rather than of being pulled out of a river.
The Danish Lad os ikke gå over åen efter vand. Svaret står lige her i teksten.
Neikime toli ieškoti to, kas yra visai šalia. Atsakymas yra čia pačiame tekste.
Word for word lands on: a river. The Danish saying is about crossing a stream to fetch water, meaning making something needlessly complicated, and taken literally it is a sentence about a walk. What arrived says do not go far looking for what is right beside us, and then says the answer is here in the text itself. The picture is gone because the picture was never the point.
Those lines were produced cold, with no glossary and no preparation. Give it your outline beforehand with Context Enhancer and it starts the service already knowing your subject and your names.
Lithuanian has a printing history that a church, of all places, ought to find familiar.
The first printed book in Lithuanian was a catechism, produced out of the Reformation, and the language's written life has been tangled up with churches ever since.
Then came a long stretch when printing Lithuanian in the Latin alphabet was forbidden outright. Books were printed across the border and carried back in by people whose whole job was to smuggle them: the book carriers, remembered by name in Lithuania to this day. Much of what they carried was religious. Prayer books, catechisms, Scripture.
The ban was eventually lifted, and the alphabet came back. But that period is why written Lithuanian has an emotional weight that is hard to explain to someone who has never had their alphabet taken away. It is also, quietly, why putting a Lithuanian speaker's own language on a screen in a church is not a neutral gesture to them.
Each of these changes what a good translation has to get right, which is why they are here rather than in a quiz.
Lithuanian keeps a living vocative, a separate shape a noun takes when you are speaking directly to someone. Prayer uses it constantly. Get it wrong and every prayer in the service quietly reads like a form letter, and a Lithuanian speaker notices immediately.
There is a familiar you and a respectful you, as in many European languages. A sermon addressed to a congregation, a prayer addressed to God and a greeting to an elderly guest do not all take the same one. Choosing it requires knowing what kind of sentence this is.
Lithuanian words carry not only where the stress falls but what the stressed syllable does with pitch, and it can move around within a word as the ending changes. It is one of the features that makes the language sound sung to outsiders, and it is part of why a Lithuanian voice has to be built for Lithuanian.
A complete Lithuanian Bible was translated in manuscript in the sixteenth century by the pastor Jonas Bretkūnas and then never printed, which is one of the sadder near misses in the language's history.
The version most Lithuanian Christians quote today came much later, with the Old Testament translated by Antanas Rubšys and the New Testament by Česlovas Kavaliauskas. Between them they set the vocabulary that a Lithuanian believer hears as scriptural rather than merely modern.
This is why the output above matters more than it looks. There is a settled word for circumcision in a Lithuanian Bible, a settled word for grace, and a settled word for the Spirit. Reaching for a plausible synonym instead is not a small stylistic slip. It is the difference between a sentence somebody recognises and a sentence they have to decode.
If your fellowship uses particular wording for names or terms, put it into Keywords and it will be used exactly, every service.
Assume no warning and no volunteer who speaks the language. This still works, and it takes about a minute.
Ask which language they would most like to listen in. Somebody from Lithuania may be more comfortable in Lithuanian, in Russian, in Polish or in English, and only they know which. Do not decide it from a surname.
They point their phone camera at the code on your card and pick Lithuanian from the list. Nothing to install, no account, no sign up. It takes about as long as finding a hymn number.
Reading for forty minutes is work. Listening is what everybody else in the room is already doing. Keep a few cheap wired earphones in a basket by the door and hand one over without making a speech about it.
No. They are the only two survivors of the same branch, and they are still not mutually intelligible. A Latvian speaker handed Lithuanian is doing translation work in their head for the whole service. Both are on the list, so put both up and let each person pick. The Latvian page goes into how differently the two of them turned out.
It is not, and it is not your business to interpret it either. Put Lithuanian, Russian and Polish on the list side by side and let each guest choose in silence. Language count is not a price lever here, so adding all three costs you nothing extra.
The lines above are unedited output and you can hand them to a Lithuanian speaker to judge. What we will say plainly is why it stands a chance: the sentence is translated as a sentence, so the endings are chosen once the meaning is known rather than patched on afterwards. That is the whole difference in a language like this one.
Yes. Lithuanian is one of the languages that can come off the stage as well as arrive in the pews, so the rest of the room follows in whatever languages you have running, at the same moment.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket and one earphone.