Georgian is not related to Russian, or Turkish, or Persian, or anything else nearby. It has its own family, its own alphabet, and a Christian tradition older than most of the buildings in Europe. It also has, right now, a problem in our system that we found by reading our own output. So this page tells you the good part and the bad part, in that order, and does not show you a demonstration.
We ran six deliberately hard Danish lines into every language in the system on the same day, through the same path a live service uses. Then somebody read the results. Georgian did not pass.
The failure was not a clumsy sentence. It was a word. The output invented a form for circumcision that is not standard Georgian, in the middle of a passage from Romans where that word carries the whole argument. A Georgian speaker would not have been puzzled by it. They would have known immediately that it was wrong.
The rest of the Georgian output read reasonably. That is precisely what makes it dangerous. A page that showed you the good sentences and left that one out would flatter us, and the first native speaker to sit in your congregation would catch it before the end of the service.
So there is no sample of Georgian on this page. Not a good one, not a bad one, and not the word we think is correct either, because until a Georgian speaker has confirmed it, printing our guess is just a second guess dressed as a fact.
And a second thing, found while writing this page. Our own language records have Georgian's writing system stored as Latin. That is simply wrong: Georgian has its own alphabet and always has. Nothing a listener sees depends on that field today, but it is our data being wrong about somebody else's language, which is not a small thing on a page like this one. It has been raised internally, and it is written here rather than quietly fixed and forgotten.
The voice. Georgian audio in an earbud is the mode where a small vocabulary slip is least likely to become a doctrinal one, because a listener hears it in the flow of a sentence and asks afterwards.
Captions on a private phone. A person reading alone can weigh a sentence, and can tell you afterwards what was wrong. That feedback is worth a great deal to us and costs them very little.
Georgian on the big screen at the front. If a word is wrong, a projector puts it in front of the entire congregation at once, including the person whose language it is. Keep Georgian on phones until this is resolved.
There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.
Colossians 3:11
This matters for a practical reason, not a sentimental one. It changes who is sitting in front of you.
Georgia was among the earliest places on earth to take Christianity as the faith of the whole country, and it has not stopped since. Not a revival, not a re-founding: a continuous line, through invasions, empires and a century in which religion was actively suppressed.
Which means a Georgian guest walking into your church is very unlikely to be encountering Christianity for the first time. They are far more likely to be measuring your service against something they already know intimately, and to find it strangely bare, or strangely loud, or simply unfamiliar in shape.
That is not a problem to solve. It is a fact to be aware of. Somebody who has stood through a two hour liturgy since childhood is not being difficult when a forty minute talk feels short to them.
The Bible went into Georgian very early in the life of the language, and the vocabulary that came out of that has been in continuous church use ever since. Which is why an invented word for a biblical term stands out so badly, and why we are not shipping around it.
Georgian writing is not a variant of anything. It is its own system, and it has three historical forms, of which one is in daily use.
Georgian has been written in three related alphabets across its history. The one people read today is the rounded, flowing one. The older two survive in manuscripts, in church use and in inscriptions, and a Georgian reader recognises them the way an English reader recognises blackletter.
The everyday Georgian script has no upper case. Names, the beginnings of sentences and the word for God all look the same size. Any caption design that leans on capitals to signal emphasis or a proper name has nothing to lean on here.
Georgian tolerates runs of consonants that would be unpronounceable in most European languages, and it writes every one of them. A word can be long, dense and completely unbreakable, which matters on a narrow caption band.
Two practical things, both easy to check in the thirty seconds before the room fills.
The mechanics all work. It is the wording we are not yet standing behind, and those are different questions.
A Georgian speaker can preach or read and the room follows in whatever languages it needs. One of the 81 languages that can be the source, not only a destination.
Georgian on the phone your guest already carries. One of 182 languages that can be read. We would keep this on phones and off the big screen for now, for the reason given above.
Two Georgian voices, one man and one woman. One of 81 languages that can be listened to rather than read, through an ordinary earbud.
Your guest joins by pointing a phone camera at a code. No account, no app, no card. This is what they see.
Not a promise with a date on it. A list of the actual steps, in the actual order.
The same six lines, read by somebody who reads the language in church, not by somebody comparing dictionaries. That is the only test that would have caught this one, and it is the only test that will confirm the fix.
Circumcision is the one we found. It is very unlikely to be the only one. The biblical vocabulary that a Georgian congregation actually uses gets written down and held to, rather than produced fresh every time.
And when they pass, this page changes and shows you the output, the way the other language pages do. Until then the honest version is the one you are reading.
If you have Georgian speakers in your congregation, we would like to hear from you. Not as a sales conversation. A church with real Georgian speakers in it is the fastest way this gets fixed properly, and knowing somebody is actually waiting moves it up the list.
Four things worth knowing, and the first one is the one people get wrong.
Because we read it and it contained a word that is not standard Georgian, in a passage where that word does the work. Showing you the sentences that came out well would be a demonstration designed to flatter us. A Georgian speaker would catch it in a second, and then nothing else on this page would be worth believing.
If somebody needs it, yes, on a phone or as a voice in an earbud, and tell them we know it is not finished. What we would not do yet is put Georgian on the screen at the front, because a wrong word there is wrong in front of everybody at once.
Ask them. Some will be entirely comfortable in Russian and some will not, and it is not a neutral question. Run both if you are unsure and let the person choose for themselves at the door. It costs nothing extra, because language count is not a price lever here.
Only if the font on that machine covers Georgian, and many do not. Put a line of Georgian up before the room fills. Empty boxes mean the font, not the translation.
This page will change. The honesty section comes down and real output goes up, the way it already does on the language pages where the review passed. That is the whole test.
Some of these show real output. Some, like this one, say plainly that we are not there yet.
Open a room in any of the languages your room needs. If Georgian is one of them, say so, and we will tell you where it stands before you run it.