Tamil has one of the longest continuous written records of any language still spoken today, and the old poetry is not a museum piece: people still quote it. It also keeps two registers side by side, one for talking and one for reading aloud, and a translation that mixes them up sounds either pompous or flippant. In the output further down, the system moves between them in the same run.
Tamil belongs to the Dravidian family, which is not related to the Indo-European languages of northern South Asia or of Europe. It has been written continuously for a very long time, and it is recognised as a classical language of India.
What makes that unusual is not the age. Plenty of languages have old texts. What is unusual is that the old texts and the living language are the same language: the classical poetry is difficult for a modern reader in the way Chaucer is difficult, not in the way Latin is difficult.
So a Tamil congregation carries a long literary memory as a live thing. Preachers quote poetry. People recognise it. That is a high standard for anything appearing on a screen beside them, and it is why the register question further down matters more in Tamil than in most languages.
Three things about the writing system, two of them practical and one of them just interesting.
Tamil builds meaning by attaching endings to a stem, and vowel marks sit around the letter on more than one side. A caption band sized for English will crowd it. Give it height and let it wrap.
Tamil uses fewer distinct consonant letters than its neighbours, and one letter can be voiced or unvoiced depending on where it sits in the word. You have to know the word to say it, which is a real problem for anything reading text aloud blindly.
Tamil has a set of numerals of its own, though everyday writing uses the same digits as English. You will occasionally see them on a church notice or in a hymn number, and now you know what they are.
Captions on the big screen are handled by MulingDisplay, which wraps the line for you. What you control is how much room you give it.
Tamil keeps a formal written register and a spoken one, and they differ in more than vocabulary. Verb endings and pronouns change.
Preach an aside, a reassurance or a story in high literary Tamil and it sounds stiff and self-important. Your guest gets the information and loses the warmth, which in a sermon is most of the point.
Render a verse in casual spoken Tamil and a congregation hears something close to disrespect. The words may be right. The register says the speaker does not understand what they are reading.
A good interpreter moves between the two inside one talk. That is the bar. The lines below show the system doing it without being asked.
Unedited output from the same path a live room uses, translating from Danish, in one run. Read by someone before it was allowed onto this page.
An aside, mid-talk. Your speaker says, in Danish: Men der er ingen ko på isen. Vi når det, vi skal.
The Danish means there is nothing to worry about. Literally it puts a cow on a frozen lake. A substitution engine keeps both and your guest is left holding an image with no purpose.
ஆனா கவலைப்பட வேண்டிய எதுவும் இல்லை.
No cow, and note the first word: it is the spoken form, not the literary one. This is Tamil as somebody would actually say it out loud in an aside, which is what the sentence was.
Then the talk turns to the text. In Danish: Kødets gerninger er tydelige nok, siger han, og de står i modsætning til Åndens frugt.
The Danish word means flesh in the plainest sense. In Galatians chapter five it means human nature set against the Spirit. An engine with no idea which book it is in sends the butcher's meaning to every language at once.
சரீரத்தின் கிரியைகள் தெளிவாகத் தெரிகின்றன என்று அவர் சொல்கிறார், அவை ஆவியின் கனிக்குப் புறம்பாக உள்ளன.
The register lifts. This is the formal Tamil of scripture, not the spoken Tamil of the line before it, and it holds the contrast the passage is built on: the works of the flesh set against the fruit of the Spirit.
Two sentences, minutes apart, in two registers, from one system, with nobody adjusting anything in between.
No preparation and no glossary was given. Share your outline beforehand with Context Enhancer and the service starts with your passage and your names already known.
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, working at the Danish mission station at Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast, produced the first translation of the New Testament into Tamil. It is one of the earliest translations of the New Testament into any language of India.
There is something fitting about that on this page, since the sentences above were translated out of Danish. Three hundred years apart, the same two languages, the same problem, and it was hard then too.
What it left behind matters more than the anecdote. Tamil Christian vocabulary has had a long time to settle, and congregations have a firm sense of which words belong in scripture and which do not. That is a gift to a translation system, because there is a settled target to hit, and it is also a trap, because a congregation notices immediately when it is missed.
If your church reads from a particular Tamil translation and uses its terms, put them in Keywords. Then every language in the room follows your vocabulary rather than a general one.
All three directions, and the listener screen is published in Tamil as well.
Yes. A Tamil-speaking preacher can lead the whole service and the rest of the room follows in its own languages, with nobody repeating sentences beside them.
Yes, on a phone or the big screen, left to right, with no special font hunting. Give the band a little more height than you would for English.
Yes, male or female, in one earphone, so your guest keeps the other ear on the singing and on the person beside them.
Your guest joins by pointing a phone camera at a code, and the screen they land on is already in Tamil. This is what they see.
This is the single most useful thing on the page for a host church, and it is the thing most often got wrong.
Tamil speakers reached Europe by several very different routes. Some families came from Sri Lanka as refugees during and after the civil war there. Others came from India for work or study, over decades and in no particular wave. Others again arrived by way of Malaysia, Singapore or the older plantation communities, and think of themselves as belonging to those places as much as to anywhere else.
They share a language. They do not necessarily share a history, a church tradition, or a view of each other. A host congregation that treats them as one group, or seats them together on that basis, can be doing something less welcoming than it thinks.
There are also real differences in the language. Sri Lankan Tamil and Indian Tamil differ in vocabulary and in accent, and for some people that difference carries weight. What you get here is standard written Tamil, which both read, and which is the register a sermon lives in anyway. If your congregation leans strongly one way, tell us.
Better conversation material than asking somebody where they are really from.
Catamaran comes from the Tamil for tied wood. Mango and curry came into English from Tamil as well. The words arrived by sea, along with everything else.
Tamil is an official language in India, in Sri Lanka and in Singapore. It is one of the few languages whose speakers can be a recognised public in three separate states.
The classical Tamil poetry known as the Sangam corpus is not only studied, it is cited. A preacher can drop a line of it into a sermon and expect the room to catch it.
It produces standard written Tamil, which is what print, preaching and school use in both India and Sri Lanka. The differences between the two are strongest in casual speech, which is the part a sermon uses least. If your congregation is overwhelmingly one or the other, tell us so we know.
It aims at the register a sermon is in, and as the two lines above show it drops into spoken Tamil for an aside and lifts into formal Tamil for a text. If your services are deliberately informal, share your notes beforehand and it will follow your tone.
Usually yes, because the people who need it most are often the ones least likely to ask. Running both costs the same as running one, so the question never has to be settled by a vote.
Yes. Tamil works as the language coming off the stage, so the room receives them in whatever languages you have running, and you can switch the stage language partway through without stopping anything.
Yes, with room. Tamil words run long, so give the caption band real height and let the line wrap rather than squeezing it into a thin strip at the bottom of the slide.
Every one of these can run at once, in one service. Language count is never a price lever here.
Or open the full list of 183 and check the three columns for the languages your room needs.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guests need nothing but the phone already in their pocket.