English lets you put off the question. French does not. Every sentence addressed to a person carries a choice between the intimate form and the formal one, and the choice is visible in the verb. A sermon makes that decision hundreds of times in forty minutes, and getting it wrong does not produce an error. It produces a preacher who sounds like a stranger, or like a salesman.
These are the places French translation goes wrong in a church, and none of them look like errors afterwards.
French prayer addresses God with the intimate form. The Lord's Prayer in French says que ton nom soit sanctifié, not the formal equivalent. Meanwhile the preacher addresses the congregation formally. Both forms appear in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence, and each one has to be right.
In France a Protestant place of worship is traditionally a temple and a Catholic one an église. A Protestant service is a culte, not a messe. These are not synonyms with a shade of difference. To a French speaker they say which tradition you belong to.
Generic translation drifts from grace to mercy and from saved to rescued, because a dictionary treats them as neighbours. A church does not. French has the right word sitting there, and the only question is whether the translation knows to reach for it.
The capital letter is doing theological work. L'Esprit and l'esprit are the Holy Spirit and a state of mind. In a caption arriving line by line, that single capital is the difference between Pentecost and a mood, and it is the sort of thing that only survives if the translation understood the sentence rather than the words.
Unedited output from the same translation path a live room uses, run on 2026-08-06 from a Danish sermon script, eight target languages at once. Watch the forms of address.
Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
Ephesians 2, in Danish
A generic engine gives mercy for grace and rescued for saved, and then has to guess whether the room is being addressed intimately or formally. It has no reason to prefer either, so it picks. Half a sermon in the wrong register is not a mistake anybody can point to. It just makes the preacher sound like he is selling something.
C'est par la grâce que vous êtes sauvés, par le moyen de la foi, et cela ne vient pas de vous, c'est le don de Dieu.
Grâce, sauvés, don: the three words a French church would use. And vous, twice, addressing the congregation the way a preacher addresses a congregation. Nothing in the Danish said to do that. The register came from understanding what kind of sentence this was.
Lad os ikke gå over åen efter vand. Svaret står lige her i teksten.
An aside, in Danish
A Danish idiom meaning let us not make this harder than it is. Rendered literally it is a sentence about fetching water, dropped into a point about a Bible passage, and it costs your guest the next thirty seconds.
Ne compliquons pas les choses pour rien.
Let us not complicate things for nothing. Notice the form: compliquons is the we form, so the preacher is standing inside the sentence with the congregation rather than instructing them from outside it. That is a pastoral posture, carried across without anybody asking for it.
Both lines came out of the production translation path, not a demonstration made for the website. How the register is chosen: Smart Translation.
If you are planning for French speakers in a European church, this is the assumption most worth checking.
The French speakers in your building are as likely to be from Congo, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal or Haiti as from France, and often more likely. Many arrive already deeply churched, from traditions with their own music, their own length of service and their own expectations of a preacher.
For captions this changes very little. Written French is shared across the French speaking world, and the biblical register is shared even more closely than the everyday one. What differs is accent, some vocabulary, and the numbers: Belgium and Switzerland say septante where France says soixante-dix, which is the kind of thing that raises an eyebrow and never causes a misunderstanding.
What it should change is your planning. A French language offer is not a gesture towards tourists. It is very often a gesture towards the people already sitting in your building on a Sunday afternoon.
All three directions are live today.
A French speaking preacher preaches in French and the room follows in its own languages. French is one of the 81 languages that can be the source.
French text on a guest's own phone, accents and capitals intact, while you speak. Nothing to install.
A French voice in one earbud, male or female, for the people who would rather listen than read for an hour.
MulingStream works with 183 languages. 80 can be spoken from the stage, 182 can be read as captions, 81 can be heard as a voice. The number of languages in a room never changes the price.
Worth knowing before you decide which one to point people at.
Captions ask a listener to split their attention between a screen and a room. Most people manage it fine, and many prefer it, because they can look up and look back down. A voice asks nothing of the eyes at all, which for an older guest, or a guest who is tired, or a guest who has left their reading glasses at home, is the difference between following the service and giving up on it.
French voices are available in both male and female, and a listener chooses on their own phone rather than being assigned one. Nobody sees what they picked, and nobody has to hand anything out or collect anything in.
One honest note: a voice always sounds like somewhere. If your congregation is strongly of one background and the accent is a distraction rather than a help, captions have no accent at all, and each person can switch between them mid-service without asking anybody.
Four things a host church is better off knowing in advance than finding out afterwards.
This is the whole job, and it does not get harder later.
Open your room, add French, done. You can do it while people are coming in, and you can add a second language beside it without changing what the gathering costs.
On the seat or on the order of service. A printed square gets scanned. A web address read out from the front does not.
Drop your outline or your passage into Context Enhancer beforehand. It arrives knowing your names and your topic, the way an interpreter would prepare.
Nobody operates anything during the service. There is no desk, no headset count, and nothing that can visibly fail in front of the congregation.
Yes. The translation knows it is carrying a sermon rather than a conversation, so it addresses the room formally and keeps the vocabulary of worship. The line further up this page shows it choosing vous without being told to.
That is exactly the judgement it is built to make, because it works from what a sentence means rather than from the words it contains. A word matching tool has no basis for the distinction at all, which is why it flips between them at random.
Not for the captions. Written French is shared across the French speaking world and the biblical register more so. What it should change is your assumptions at the door, and the way you talk about the offer.
Yes. French is one of the languages that can be the source, so a visiting preacher speaks French and everybody else reads or hears it in theirs. Nothing about the setup changes.
It will occasionally, the same way a human interpreter occasionally does. The words most at risk are the ones specific to you, so put your names, your places and your community's vocabulary into Keywords and those stop being a question.
Each of these has a hook the others do not share.
See all 183 languages, with what each one can do.
They will know from the first sentence whether the register is right, and their verdict is worth more than any page we could write.