Bosnian sits on our list beside Croatian and Serbian as a standard in its own right. The three are close, and what to call them is something people feel strongly about. We take no position on any of it. What we do is put all three up together and let each guest choose their own, on their own phone, without anybody at the door having to ask a question that is nobody's business.
A church does not need to understand the argument in order to handle it well. It needs to avoid putting anybody in a position where they have to answer for themselves.
Nobody should have to explain a language choice in order to sit down in your church. That is the whole of it.
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. Here are three of the Bosnian ones.
The Danish Men der er ingen ko på isen.
Ali nema nikakvog razloga za brigu.
Word for word lands on: a cow standing on ice. The Danish saying means there is nothing to worry about, and a substitution engine sends the livestock and leaves your guest wondering what the animal has to do with the summer holidays. What arrived says there is no reason at all to worry, in the register somebody would use out loud.
The Danish Lad os ikke gå over åen efter vand.
Nemojmo nepotrebno komplikovati.
Word for word lands on: a walk to a stream with a bucket. The Danish means making something needlessly complicated, and this drops the picture entirely and says the thing itself. Look at the ending on the last word: Bosnian takes borrowed verbs one way and Croatian takes them another, and the same Danish line came back noticeably longer in Croatian.
The Danish Omskærelsen er ikke den ydre på kroppen, men hjertets omskærelse ved Ånden.
Obrezanje nije ono spoljašnje na tijelu, nego obrezanje srca po Duhu.
Word for word lands on: a surgical procedure described clinically, which destroys the figure Paul is making about the heart. What arrived is the term a Bible uses, kept identical in both halves so the contrast still stands, with the word for body spelled the way Bosnian spells it.
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.
Nothing dramatic. A set of habits, each small, and together unmistakable to somebody who grew up with them.
Bosnian uses the longer vowel sequence in words like body, faith and time, the same way Croatian does and unlike the eastern spelling. You can see it in the third line above.
To complicate, to organise, to inform: Bosnian usually gives them one ending where Croatian gives them another. It is one of the fastest ways a reader places a text without thinking about it.
In practice Bosnian is written in the Latin alphabet, and that is what arrives here. Both alphabets have historically been used in Bosnia, and if a guest specifically wants Cyrillic then the Serbian entry is what to reach for.
Three separate questions, all three yes.
A Bosnian speaker can preach, pray or give a testimony, and the rest of the room follows in whatever languages you are running. One of the 81 languages that can be the source.
On your guest's own phone, or up on the wall through MulingDisplay. One of 182 that can be read.
One of 81 that can be listened to rather than read, through one ordinary earbud.
Bosnian sits in the list as bs, its own name Bosanski. See all 183 languages.
Bosnian carries a layer of vocabulary from Turkish and Arabic that the neighbouring standards use less, and it is thickest exactly where a church is working: religion, hospitality, family, everyday courtesy.
Most of that vocabulary is simply Bosnian and belongs to everybody who speaks it. But some of it carries a specific religious register, and a Christian service translated into it can end up sounding like something it is not. This is the same problem the Persian page describes at greater length, and the answer is the same: the register has to be chosen deliberately rather than by frequency.
Our output above uses the Christian register: the word a Bible uses for circumcision, the ordinary word for the Spirit as Scripture uses it. That is what the church setting is for.
Where it cannot guess is your own vocabulary. Your fellowship's name, the names of your people, the particular words your community has settled on. Put those into Keywords and they are used exactly, every service, and they stop being a question.
There are established Bosnian communities across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, and many of those families arrived as refugees from the war in Bosnia.
Which means these are not new arrivals. Households commonly hold a grandparent who is most comfortable only in Bosnian, a parent who works entirely in the host language, and young adults who move between the two without noticing they are doing it.
That is the practical case for running Bosnian as one language among several rather than as a separate meeting in a side room. The family sits together. The grandparent gets the sermon in Bosnian, the rest get it in the host language, and nobody has to be moved anywhere.
A lot of this church life happens in small fellowships in borrowed buildings, with no budget for an interpreter at all. That is exactly the gap this is meant to fill.
There is a Bosnian voice, and more than one, so you can pick a man's voice or a woman's voice to suit the room.
For an older guest who has been following a second language for decades, reading a screen for forty minutes is not an easier option. It is a harder one. The eyes tire, the head goes down, and the person spends the whole service looking at their lap rather than at the people around them.
A voice puts them back in the room. One earbud, not two, so they still hear the singing and the person beside them. They can look up. They can watch the speaker's face.
Your guest would understand Croatian. That is not the same as it being right. Adding Bosnian is one tap, costs nothing extra, and removes the only uncomfortable moment in the whole process. Add all three and stop thinking about it.
No. Put all three on the list and let each person pick on their own phone, privately. Asking out loud turns something personal into something public, in a room full of strangers.
It is the same language and they receive the same translation, so nothing about the tool changes. What changes is your own vocabulary and how you use it, and that is your call, not ours. Whatever wording you settle on, put it in Keywords so it comes out the same every time.
Yes. Bosnian can be the language coming off the stage as well as one arriving in the pews, so everybody else receives it in their own language at the same moment.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket and one earphone.