Latvian and Lithuanian are the last two members of the Baltic branch. That sounds like it should make them near enough interchangeable, the way people assume about any two neighbours. It does not. A Latvian speaker listening to Lithuanian catches a word here and there and then loses the thread, and the reverse is just as true. If you are putting one of them on a screen for a guest, it has to be the right one.
Related is a fact about ancestry. It is not a promise about comprehension, and the assumption that it is has embarrassed a lot of well meaning welcomes.
Long endings, a stress that moves around inside a word as the ending changes, and a pitch pattern riding on top of it. Linguists study Lithuanian precisely because so little was worn away.
Endings shortened. Stress moved to the first syllable of the word and stayed there, in almost every word. The case system simplified. The result is a language that sounds noticeably flatter and more clipped to a Lithuanian ear, and reads quite differently on the page.
The practical instruction is one line. Put Latvian and Lithuanian on the list side by side and let each guest choose their own. It costs you nothing, because language count is not a price lever here.
Unedited output from the same path that runs a live room, translating from Danish with the church setting on. Three lines, with what a word for word reading would have produced instead.
The Danish Men der er ingen ko på isen.
Bet nav pamata satraukumam.
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. What arrived says there is no ground for alarm, in the register a person would actually use out loud.
The Danish Kødets gerninger er tydelige nok, siger han, og de står i modsætning til Åndens frugt.
Miesas darbi ir pilnīgi skaidri, viņš saka, un tie ir pretstatā Gara auglim.
Word for word lands on: meat, at a butcher. Danish uses the same short word for both, and so does English. Latvian does not: it has a separate word for meat you cook and the word used here, which is flesh in the sense Galatians means. Getting that one wrong turns a whole passage into a shopping list.
The Danish Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
Jūs esat izglābti žēlastībā caur ticību, un tas nav no jums, tā ir Dieva dāvana.
Word for word lands on: pity and rescued. Those are the everyday words and they are not what a church means by grace and saved. What arrived keeps the theological pair intact and finishes with the gift of God rather than a present from God, which is a different sentence entirely.
These were produced cold, with no glossary. Hand them to a Latvian speaker in your congregation and let them mark them. That is a better test than anything we could tell you.
Latvian writes in the Latin alphabet, and then does three different things to it. A bar over a vowel makes it long. A hook over a consonant changes the sound. A comma under a consonant softens it. All three are part of the spelling, not accents you can drop when space is tight.
This matters on a projector more than anywhere else. Strip the bars off the vowels and you are not producing slightly informal Latvian, you are producing different words. It reads to a Latvian the way writing English entirely without the letter e would read to you.
The current spelling is not ancient. Latvian was written for a long time in a system built on German habits and printed in a heavy Gothic type, and it was replaced by the alphabet in use now during the twentieth century. Older Latvian church books can therefore look almost unreadable to a young Latvian, which is worth knowing if somebody in your church has inherited one.
All three directions, so you are never choosing between including somebody and doing it properly.
A Latvian 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, not only a destination.
On the phone your guest already carries, or up on the wall through MulingDisplay. One of 182 languages that can be read.
One of 81 languages that can be listened to rather than read, through an ordinary earbud.
Latvian sits in the list as lv, its own name Latviešu. See all 183 languages.
The first complete Bible in Latvian was the work of a Lutheran pastor, Ernst Glück, in the seventeenth century. He is remembered in Latvia less as a translator than as the man who fixed what written Latvian would be.
That is not unusual in this part of Europe. A Bible translation is often the first time anybody has to decide, on every page, which of several regional ways of saying a thing becomes the way it is written down. Those decisions then last for centuries, because they are what everybody learned to read from.
The practical consequence for you is a settled religious vocabulary. There are words a Latvian believer hears as scriptural, and near synonyms that sound like a newspaper. A translation that reaches for the second set is not wrong exactly. It is just unrecognisable, and your guest spends the sermon translating it back.
If your fellowship has its own wording, put it into Keywords and it will be used exactly, every service.
Latvia is small and its language is not uniform. Here is what arrives, and what it does not cover.
What arrives is the standard written language: what school, radio, print and the pulpit use. It is the register a sermon would be delivered in anyway, and it is understood everywhere Latvian is spoken.
The east of the country has its own written form, Latgalian, with a strong Catholic tradition behind it and people who care about it a great deal. Standard Latvian is understood there. If somebody tells you Latgalian is their language, they are telling you something real, and the honest answer is that what we send is the standard.
The old coastal language of the region, Livonian, is not Baltic at all. It belongs with Estonian and Finnish, and it has effectively stopped being a community language. It is not on our list and we would rather say so than let you find out.
Latvians are one of the communities that moved most within Europe once free movement opened up, and the pattern is familiar to anyone who has run a church in Britain, Ireland, Germany or the Nordic countries.
Households are usually mixed. A grandmother who is only really comfortable in Latvian, a father who works entirely in the host language, and young adults who switch between the two without noticing they are doing it. That is precisely the argument for running Latvian as one language among several rather than as a separate meeting in a side room. The family sits together and each person gets what they need.
A great deal of Latvian church life abroad happens in small fellowships in borrowed buildings, without any budget for an interpreter. That gap is what this exists to fill.
There is a Latvian voice, and more than one of them, so you can pick a man's voice or a woman's voice to suit the room.
Reading captions for forty minutes is work. Everybody else in the room is listening, and the one person who is reading is doing something harder than the rest of you while trying to look like they are not.
A voice puts them back on the same footing. It reads the translated sentence into one ear while the speaker carries on at the front, and it uses one earbud rather than two, so your guest still hears the singing, the laughter and the person sitting next to them.
For older guests in particular this is not a nice extra. It is the version that works.
No. They are relatives, not variants, and a Latvian speaker following Lithuanian is doing real work for the whole service. Both are on the list. Add both, say nothing, and let each person pick.
It is not, and it is not for you to interpret. Put Latvian and Russian side by side on the list and let each guest choose in silence. Nobody is asked to declare anything at the door and nobody has to explain a choice.
Yes. The marks are part of the spelling and they are kept, at a size that does not clip them. If your wall display is set at a font size where letters start losing their tops, that is a setting worth fixing for every language you run, not just this one.
Not as its own entry. What arrives is standard Latvian, which is understood in Latgale. We would rather print that plainly than let a Latgalian speaker discover it on a Sunday.
Yes. Latvian can be the language coming off the stage as well as one of the languages arriving in the pews, so the rest of the room receives it in their own languages at the same moment.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket and one earphone.