Characters borrowed from Chinese carry the meanings. One set of phonetic letters carries the grammar around them. A second set of phonetic letters carries names and words from outside Japanese, which in a sermon means most of the names in it. All three appear in the same line, and a reader moves between them without noticing. A caption that gets the mixture wrong is readable in the way a road sign in the wrong font is readable.
You do not need to read Japanese to see it happening. In the output further down the page, the dense blocky characters are meanings and the rounder flowing ones are the grammar holding them together.
Six Danish lines were run into every language at once, the way a real room runs, and nothing has been edited since. Here are three of the Japanese ones.
割礼は体の外側に施されるものではなく、御霊によって心に与えられる割礼です。
From the Danish Omskærelsen er ikke den ydre på kroppen, men hjertets omskærelse ved Ånden.
Two decisions in one sentence. 割礼 is the biblical word rather than the clinical one. 御霊 is the Spirit in the register Japanese Bibles use, not one of the everyday words that also translate as spirit. And the sentence ends in the polite form, which is the form a talk is given in.
彼は、肉の行いは明らかであり、御霊の実と対立していると言っています
From the Danish Kødets gerninger er tydelige nok, siger han, og de står i modsætning til Åndens frugt.
肉 on its own is meat. 肉の行い is the phrase Japanese Scripture uses for what Paul means in Galatians, and it does not read as a sentence about food. The contrast with 御霊の実, the fruit of the Spirit, is held intact.
わざわざ遠回りしないようにしましょう。答えはこの箇所の中にあります。
From the Danish Lad os ikke gå over åen efter vand. Svaret står lige her i teksten.
The Danish is a picture of crossing a stream to fetch water. The Japanese is a let us in the inclusive polite form, and the picture has become the plain idea of going the long way round for no reason. 箇所 is the word used of a passage of Scripture.
Six lines is a small sample and we are not pretending otherwise. It is real, it is unedited, and it is more than a claim about accuracy with nothing behind it.
Every one of these has an ordinary Japanese word that a dictionary offers first, and a different word that a church means. The gap between them is where a live translation embarrasses itself.
A mind or a mentality, or else a ghost
御霊
肉, which is meat at a butcher
肉の行い
The name of a surgical procedure
割礼
The usual word offered for mercy carries Buddhist weight and is not what a church means
恵み
One honest note about 御霊. Japanese Bible translations do not all agree here. Some use 御霊 and some use the plainer 霊. Ours produced the traditional form. If the translation your congregation reads uses the other one, put it into Keywords and every service after that will match the book in their hands.
This is the structural part, and it is the reason translating a few words at a time fails in Japanese faster than in most languages.
And with it the politeness, and whether the sentence was even positive or negative. Nothing about the tone of a Japanese sentence is settled until the end of it.
Japanese drops he, she, you and we whenever the room already knows. A translation that spells them out every time is grammatical and reads like a language exercise. Knowing when to leave a word out is as much of the job as knowing what to put in.
Plain, polite, and the heightened respectful forms are different grammar, not different tone. A talk holds one level from beginning to end, and switching partway sounds like the speaker changed their mind about the audience.
This is exactly what Smart Translation exists for: it works from whole thoughts, so the ending it produces is the one the sentence was heading toward.
Japanese is one of the languages that can be heard as a voice, not only read. For an older guest, and for anybody sitting in low light at the end of a long week, that is usually the difference between using it and putting the phone away.
A Japanese voice has to hold the politeness it is given. A sentence read in the plain form to a congregation does not sound casual, it sounds like the speaker forgot who was in the room. Listen to two minutes with a Japanese speaker beside you and you will know inside one sentence whether it is right.
Three separate questions, and Japanese answers yes to all three.
A Japanese speaker can preach and everyone else follows in their own language. Japanese is one of the 81 languages that can be the source rather than only a destination.
Japanese on the phone your guest is already holding, no app and no account. One of 182 languages that can be read.
One of 81 languages that can be listened to instead of read, through an ordinary earbud.
Japanese needs a small word between the number and the thing, and which one depends on the shape of the thing: flat, long, small, alive, human. Three chairs and three people do not take the same word.
Vertical writing is not historical. Books and hymn sheets still use it while screens use horizontal. Both are ordinary, and a Japanese reader switches without thinking about it.
Paul, Galatia, Pentecost: names from outside Japanese are written in katakana, and a reader recognises them as foreign names by their shape alone, before reading a syllable.
From what the sentence is doing and who it is addressed to. A talk given to a gathered room is a different act from a conversation between two people, and the translation is built to tell them apart. The Japanese on this page is what it settled on with nobody steering it.
Usually. Names are also the single easiest thing to make certain of: put your speaker's name and any names particular to your church into Keywords and they will never be guessed at, in Japanese or in any other language the room is running.
They are laid out for Japanese: line breaks that respect the rules about which characters may not start or end a line, and line height that gives the characters room. Your guest can also make the text larger without anything colliding.
Yes. Japanese can be the language spoken from the stage as well as one of the languages being listened to, so a visiting Japanese speaker preaches while everybody else reads or hears their own language at the same moment.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket.