It is a small humiliation, and it does not have to happen. Give MulingStream the words that must never be guessed at, and they come through intact in every language your room is running.
A translation tool tries to be helpful. It sees a word it recognises and finds the nearest one in the other language. That is exactly right for most words and exactly wrong for a name.
Grace, Faith, Joy, Mark, Hope, Christian. Ordinary words in English and somebody’s actual name in the third row. A tool with no list will translate the word and lose the person.
Your building, your street, your town, the village somebody came from. Half of these look like ordinary nouns, and translated as nouns they stop being places anybody can find.
The name of your youth group. The thing you all call the Thursday meeting. The phrase your church has said for forty years. No dictionary has these. Yours does.
Not before every service. Once. Your regular names and terms are saved for your organisation, and every room you open after that already has them. A room can carry its own extra words too, for the visiting speaker or the one-off event.
Most churches end up with somewhere between ten and thirty words. The leadership team, the building, the two or three things you say every week, and the parts of the Bible you preach from most. Adding one more takes seconds, so people add them as they come up.
If you are unsure, put it on. There is no cost to a keyword that never comes up.
Every other part of the translation can be a little imperfect and nobody minds. Names are different. A name is the one word in the sentence that is about a person, and getting it wrong is the one mistake people take personally.
Somebody sitting there in their second language, following well, hears their own name turned into a word. Or hears their home town turned into a description. It is small and it is not neutral. It says: this room was not really built with you in mind.
The sentence around it is translated properly, and the name in the middle of it is still their name, in the middle of a sentence in their own language. That is what being welcomed sounds like when you cannot follow the room.
This is not a translation feature. It is a hospitality feature that happens to live in a translation product.
All four are included for everybody.
Share your outline or slides beforehand so it knows the topic, the names and the terms before you begin.
How preparing works →
Whole sentences built from what you meant, said the way that language actually says things.
How it translates →
A quiet line of explanation when a reference will not carry across on its own.
See a hint →
One list of keywords protects those words in every language in the room, including the ones written right to left.
Find your language →
More than you will ever need. Nobody has run out. Add them as they occur to you rather than trying to think of them all at once.
No. The organisation list is saved and comes with you into every room. You only touch it when something new turns up, like a visiting speaker, and a one-off word can go on the room instead.
Add it as it is written. What matters is that it is recognised as a name and left alone, rather than being turned into a word that means something else.
Yes. If your community uses words from another language in the middle of English sentences, those are exactly the words that need protecting, and they are welcome on the list.
Yes. Keywords, Context Enhancer, Smart Translation, Smart Hints and MulingDisplay are all included. There is no version of MulingStream that mangles names to save you money.
Open a room, write down the ten words that matter most, and hear them come back intact.