Kazakh has been written in an Arabic based script, then a Latin one, then Cyrillic, and the government has announced a move back toward Latin. The changeover has been running for years and the design of the new alphabet has been revised more than once. Almost nothing else in this list of 183 languages is doing that right now, and it is not a footnote: it decides what a caption should even look like on the screen in front of somebody.
Kazakh in Cyrillic is not Russian in Cyrillic, and the difference is the part that breaks.
Kazakh uses the Cyrillic alphabet with extra letters added for sounds Russian does not have. They look like familiar Cyrillic letters wearing a tail, a bar or a pair of dots. To a reader they are ordinary letters. To a font that was only ever tested on Russian, several of them do not exist.
When that happens you do not get a slightly wrong letter. You get an empty box, or a blank, or a letter that has silently become a different one. Put that on a projector at the front of a room and the mistake is the size of a wall.
There is a second, quieter trap. Because most of the letters are shared with Russian, a Kazakh line that has lost its special letters still looks like language. It does not look broken. It looks like bad spelling, which is worse, because nobody in the room reports it.
So the practical advice for a church is short. Before you put Kazakh on the big screen, put it on a phone first and have a Kazakh speaker glance at it. Thirty seconds. It is the same check we would want for any language whose alphabet has extra letters, and Kazakh has more of them than most.
A script change is not a spelling reform. It cuts a reader off from everything printed before it.
Kazakh was written for a long time in a script adapted from Arabic, running right to left. It is still used by Kazakh speaking communities outside Kazakhstan, which means a Kazakh from one country and a Kazakh from another may not be able to read each other's writing while understanding every word of each other's speech.
Then a Latin alphabet was introduced, and for a period Kazakh was written in Latin letters. It did not last.
Cyrillic replaced it, with extra letters invented for the sounds Kazakh has and Russian does not. This is what Kazakh is written in today, what our system produces, and what almost every Kazakh adult reads fastest.
The government has announced a return to a Latin alphabet. The work has been running for years, the proposed design has been revised more than once, and Cyrillic remains what people actually read in the meantime.
Why this matters to a church and not only to a linguist. A language mid transition has readers with different habits sitting in the same row. Someone schooled in Cyrillic reads it without thinking and works at Latin. Someone younger may be the other way round. There is no single right answer for the whole room, which is exactly the situation this product was built for.
Three separate questions, and Kazakh answers yes to all three.
A Kazakh speaker can preach or read and the room follows in every other language you have running. One of 81 languages that can be the source.
In Cyrillic, which is what Kazakh is read in today. One of 182 languages that can be read, on a guest's phone or at the front with MulingDisplay.
Four Kazakh voices, a man or a woman as the room prefers. One of 81 languages that can be listened to rather than read, and the option that sidesteps the alphabet question entirely.
This website is published in Kazakh too, which is true of only a minority of the 183 languages in the list. A Kazakh speaker can read the pricing, the help and every page of this site in their own language.
Danish in, Kazakh out, through the same path a live room uses. Unedited, in the Cyrillic alphabet Kazakh reads today.
Your speaker says, in Danish: Omskærelsen er ikke den ydre på kroppen, men hjertets omskærelse ved Ånden.
The Danish word is the ordinary clinical one. Taken at face value, this becomes a sentence about an operation, and Paul's whole argument in Romans 2, that the mark that counts is not on the body, disappears into a medical note.
Сүндеттеу денедегі сыртқы нәрсе емес, Рух арқылы жүректің сүндеттелуі.
The figure survives. The sentence stays about the heart and the Spirit rather than about the body, and the second half is built as a single word carrying the circumcision of the heart, which is how Kazakh does that job.
Ол былай дейді: тәннің істері анық, және олар Рухтың жемісіне қарсы.
From the Danish Kødets gerninger er tydelige nok, siger han, og de står i modsætning til Åndens frugt.
The works of the flesh, from Galatians 5. Word for word, the Danish word means meat at a butcher's counter. This is the word for the body set against the Spirit, which is the distinction the passage is entirely built on.
Бірақ уайымдауға ешқандай себеп жоқ.
From the Danish Men der er ingen ko på isen.
There is no reason at all to worry. The Danish literally says there is no cow on the ice. The cow does not survive the crossing, and it should not: it was never what the speaker meant.
Produced with no glossary and no preparation. Hand the service your outline beforehand with Context Enhancer and it starts already knowing your passage and your names.
Kazakh endings change shape to match the vowels already in the word, the same way Hungarian and Turkish do. It is invisible to a visitor and completely obvious to a speaker, and it is one of the fastest ways to tell careful Kazakh from careless Kazakh.
Kazakh is a Turkic language, so the machinery underneath is familiar to a Turkish speaker even where the words are not. That does not make them mutually understandable. It does mean somebody who has learned one has a real head start on the other.
One pronoun covers both, and nouns have no gender at all. Which is why a Kazakh speaker talking in English will sometimes say he when they mean she and immediately correct themselves. It is not carelessness. Their language never asked them to choose.
Said carefully, because a promise with a date attached is how a language page turns into a liability.
Today, Kazakh captions come out in Cyrillic, and that is the right default: it is what almost every Kazakh adult reads fastest, and it is what the language is printed in.
If the transition reaches the point where a congregation would rather read Latin, or where younger readers in the room have grown up on it, we want Kazakh in the Latin alphabet to be a choice a listener makes rather than one we make for them. That is genuinely intended. It is not scheduled, and we are not going to invent a date for it here.
The thing that moves it is not a roadmap meeting. It is a church telling us their people are waiting on it. That has always been how the list changes.
In the meantime there is a way around the whole question. A voice has no alphabet. Your guest puts in one earphone and hears the sermon in Kazakh, and the script debate never reaches them.
A guest from Kazakhstan is not automatically a Kazakh speaker, and this is the commonest mistake made about them.
Kazakhstan is a country with a large Russian speaking population, and plenty of its citizens are more comfortable in Russian than in Kazakh, including people who are ethnically Kazakh. Plenty of others are the reverse and would much rather not be handed Russian. You cannot tell which from a passport, a face or a surname.
So the useful question at the door is the same one it always is: which language would you rather listen in. Offer both, quietly, and let them answer. Running both at once costs nothing extra, because every pass carries as many languages as your guests need.
There are also Kazakh speaking communities well outside Kazakhstan, including in China and Mongolia, and some of those write the language in the older Arabic based script. A guest from one of those communities may speak Kazakh perfectly and read our Cyrillic captions slowly or not at all. For them, the voice is not a nice extra. It is the version that works.
In Europe, Kazakh speakers turn up mostly as students, researchers and people who moved for work, scattered rather than clustered. Rarely a whole congregation. Usually one or two people, which is precisely the case a church has never had a good answer for.
Cyrillic, which is what Kazakh is written and read in today. If your congregation needs the Latin alphabet, tell us. We are not going to put a date on it here, and we would rather say that plainly than promise something to fill a gap on a page.
Only if that is what your guest asks for. Some people from Kazakhstan genuinely prefer Russian, and some would experience being handed it as a decision made on their behalf. Offer both and let them choose. It costs nothing extra to run both in the same service.
They should, and it is worth thirty seconds of checking before a service rather than discovering it in front of a room. Show a line on a phone first and have a Kazakh speaker glance at it. Missing letters in Kazakh do not look broken, they look like poor spelling, which is why nobody reports them.
Yes. Kazakh can be the language coming off the stage as well as one of the languages in the pews, so a Kazakh sermon reaches everybody else in their own language at the same moment.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket and one earphone.