A guest from Casablanca and a guest from Baghdad can sit in the same row, both say they speak Arabic, and not follow each other's everyday speech. What they do share is the written standard: the Arabic of books, news and scripture, which everybody reads and nobody uses at home. That is the variety your captions should be in, and it is the variety they are in.
This is the single thing most churches do not know about Arabic, and it decides everything else on this page.
Modern Standard Arabic is what schools teach, what newspapers print and what scripture is read in. Nobody grows up speaking it. Everybody who has been to school reads it comfortably, from Morocco to Iraq.
Underneath it sit the varieties people actually speak: Moroccan, Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, Gulf, Sudanese and more. Some of these are close enough to follow each other. Some are not. A Moroccan and an Iraqi speaking their home varieties to each other will often switch to the standard, or to a shared middle ground, in order to be understood at all.
So your captions go out in the written standard. It is the one variety every literate Arabic speaker in your room can read, whichever country they came from. Choosing a spoken variety would serve one part of the room and quietly shut out the rest.
One consequence to know: a guest who did not finish school, or who left it long ago, may read the standard slowly even though they speak Arabic fluently. That is exactly who the voice is for.
All three directions, and the right to left handling that has to come with them.
Speak it. An Arabic speaking preacher works, with the room following in their own languages.
Read it. Live captions on a phone, or on the wall through MulingDisplay.
Hear it. A voice in the ear, for anyone who would rather listen than read.
Right to left. One of 17 languages in MulingStream written this way, handled properly everywhere.
Arabic sits in the list as ar, its own name العربية. See all 183 languages.
On top of the variety question sits a vocabulary question. Arabic speaking Christianity is ancient and it has its own settled words, some shared with the wider language and some not. Getting these right is most of what separates a translation that sounds like church from one that sounds like a news bulletin.
This surprises Western churches more than anything else on this page. Arabic speaking Christians have called God الله for as long as there has been Arabic Christianity, and Arabic Bibles print it on nearly every page. It is the ordinary Arabic word for God, not a claim about whose God. A church that tries to avoid it is correcting people about their own language.
Arabic speaking Christians say يسوع. The other form, عيسى, is the one used in the Qur'an. Both are recognisable to everybody, and only one of them is what a congregation sings. This is the kind of distinction a general purpose translation tool has no reason to care about.
Grace is النعمة, not a favour granted. Saved uses the root behind مخلّص, salvation, not the verb for pulling somebody out of a river. Church is الكنيسة, baptism is المعمودية, the Holy Spirit is الروح القدس. Each has a plain alternative that a generic engine will reach for, and each alternative is subtly wrong.
MulingStream translates a service as a service. The church setting is what puts the sentence in the register above rather than the one a news translator would use. It is not a plan you upgrade to. It is how it translates.
Unedited output from the path that runs a live room. A Danish preacher said the Danish. This is the Arabic that reached the phones.
Said in Danish
Men der er ingen ko på isen. Vi når det, vi skal.
What Arabic listeners got
لكن لا داعي للقلق.
What word for word does instead
It puts a cow on a sheet of ice. The Danish means there is nothing to worry about. Your guest gets livestock and spends the next minute of the sermon trying to work out the metaphor.
Said in Danish
Omskærelsen er ikke den ydre på kroppen, men hjertets omskærelse ved Ånden.
What Arabic listeners got
الختان ليس هو الخارجي في الجسد، بل هو ختان القلب بالروح.
What word for word does instead
It reaches for the clinical term, because that is the common meaning outside a church. In Romans the word is a figure about the heart, and the clinical reading turns a familiar verse into something startling.
Said in Danish
Og Ånden faldt over dem alle sammen, og de begyndte at tale på andre sprog.
What Arabic listeners got
ونزل الروح على جميعهم، وبدأوا يتكلمون بلغات أخرى.
What word for word does instead
It picks whichever meaning is most common in ordinary text, which is rarely the one being preached about on the day of Pentecost. The verb matters too: نزل is the verb an Arabic speaking church uses for exactly this.
Said in Danish
Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
What Arabic listeners got
فَبِالنِّعْمَةِ أَنْتُمْ مُخَلَّصُونَ بِالإِيمَانِ، وَذَلِكَ لَيْسَ مِنْكُمْ، هُوَ عَطِيَّةُ اللهِ.
What word for word does instead
It gives mercy and rescued. Look closely at what came back instead: the vowel marks are written in, which is how Arabic scripture is printed and almost never how ordinary Arabic is written. It arrived sounding like a verse because it is a verse.
Nothing above was tidied up afterwards. Read how the translation reaches sentences like these on the Smart Translation page.
Arabic runs right to left, letters join to their neighbours and change shape depending on where they sit in a word, and short vowels are usually left out entirely. None of that is difficult to read. All of it is easy to render badly.
Persian uses a version of the same script and is an entirely different language underneath. If you have both in your church, run both. Neither costs extra.
If your Arabic speaking members have been Christians a long time, a particular translation is almost certainly the one in their head.
For generations of Arabic speaking Protestants and many others besides, this is the Bible. Its language is formal and classical, printed with the vowel marks in, and it set the register for how scripture is supposed to sound in Arabic. People quote whole verses of it from memory, with the rhythm intact.
Contemporary Arabic versions are easier for a younger reader or a newcomer, and they are what many churches hand out today. A congregation often has both in the room: an older member quoting the classical wording and a younger one reading something plainer, and both entirely happy.
You do not have to choose between them. Put the wording your congregation actually uses for your regular passages into Keywords, and paste the reading into Context Enhancer before you speak. Both take a minute and both are done once.
Four things worth knowing, all of them about people rather than about software.
Arabic speaking Christianity is older than most of the churches reading this page. Your Arabic speaking guest may come from a family that has been Christian for many centuries, may know the liturgy better than you do, and may find being treated as a recent arrival to the faith quietly insulting.
And some of your guests will be exactly as new as you assumed, and will be carrying a cost for it that nobody in the room can see. The way to serve both is the same: offer the language on a card, say nothing from the front, and let people be whoever they are.
There is no correct flag for Arabic. It is spoken across an enormous number of countries with very different histories, and picking one of them would be a statement about the rest. MulingStream never shows a flag beside a language anywhere, and your welcome card should not either.
Some fluent Arabic speakers read the written standard slowly, especially if their schooling was interrupted. Nobody is going to raise a hand and say so. Having the voice available on the same screen means they never have to.
The written standard, which is what every literate Arabic speaker reads regardless of where they grew up. It is not Moroccan, Egyptian or Levantine, because choosing one of those would serve part of your room and shut out the rest. It is the Arabic of books and of scripture, which is also the register a sermon belongs in.
Give him the voice. It is on the same screen, one tap away, and he does not have to explain anything to anybody to choose it. This is the most common quiet need in an Arabic speaking room and almost nobody will mention it out loud.
Yes, because that is the Arabic word for God and it is what Arabic Bibles and Arabic speaking congregations use. If it did anything else it would be inventing a vocabulary that no Arabic speaking church actually uses.
Yes. Arabic is one of the languages MulingStream can listen to from the stage. He preaches in Arabic, and the Danish, English, Ukrainian and Persian speakers in the room read or hear it at the same moment. It works in both directions and neither direction costs extra.
No. Arabic on MulingDisplay aligns and wraps from the right, and can sit beside a left to right language without either one being squeezed. Numbers, names and references inside the sentence stay where they belong.
Languages that share the script, and the parts of MulingStream this page kept mentioning.
Same script family, entirely different language, and a vocabulary question that a church has to handle with real care.
Also written in a version of the Arabic script, and a language where we say plainly that we do not yet tell the varieties apart reliably.
The words that must never be guessed: your church's name, your leaders, and the Arabic wording your congregation has settled on. Set once, used every week.
A Service Pass for one gathering, a Day Pass for the day, a Week Pass for seven days. Every pass carries as many languages as your guests need, and nothing expires.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guests need nothing but the phone already in their pocket.