Burmese looks like nothing else on a screen: rows of small round shapes, almost no straight lines anywhere. That is not a style choice made by a designer. It is what happens when a language is written by scratching a stylus into a dried palm leaf, where a straight stroke follows the grain and splits the leaf in half. The material chose the letters. The leaves are long gone and the circles stayed.
The most enjoyable fact on this page, and the one with the most practical consequences.
Before paper, a great deal of this part of the world wrote on dried palm leaves. You do not write on a leaf with ink and a brush. You scratch it with a metal stylus, then rub soot into the scratches so the marks show.
A leaf has a grain running along its length. Cut a long straight line along that grain and the leaf tears. So scribes drew curves instead, and kept drawing curves, and over a very long time the letters themselves became round. Burmese is what an alphabet looks like when it has been shaped by the thing it was written on.
There is a second consequence that matters more on a screen. Burmese does not sit letters one after another in a neat row. Marks attach above, below and around the letter, and consonants stack underneath each other. A single readable unit can be three pieces tall.
And it does not put spaces between words. Spaces appear, but they separate phrases rather than words, which means a line of Burmese can be broken in a place that is not a word boundary at all.
What to check before Sunday. Burmese needs a font that actually has it, and it needs vertical room. A caption band cropped tight for Latin letters will clip the marks above and below, and a clipped mark in Burmese is not a cosmetic problem: it is a different word. Put a line of Burmese on your screen for half a minute before the room fills.
Burmese has a written form and a spoken form that pull apart, and a sermon lives in the gap between them.
Formal written Burmese uses a set of small grammatical words that nobody says out loud in conversation. It is the register of books, official notices and, traditionally, anything serious. Spoken Burmese uses different ones entirely, and to a Burmese ear the two are unmistakably different.
Modern writing has moved a long way toward the spoken form, and a live caption is a strong case for going with it. Captions are speech written down. A talk rendered into the formal literary register reads like a government circular and puts distance between the speaker and the person following.
Burmese also has a written history that goes back a very long way, with stone inscriptions surviving from the old kingdoms. It is not a recently written language, and a Burmese reader has a long tradition behind their sense of what looks right.
Six deliberately hard Danish lines went into every language at once, the way a real room runs, and nothing has been edited since. Three of the Burmese ones are here.
အရွတ်လှီးခြင်းဆိုတာ ကိုယ်ခန္ဓာရဲ့ အပြင်ပိုင်းမဟုတ်ဘဲ၊ သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်ကြောင့် နှလုံးရဲ့ အရွတ်လှီးခြင်းပဲ ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။
From the Danish Omskærelsen er ikke den ydre på kroppen, men hjertets omskærelse ved Ånden.
Read word for word, the Danish is about a surgical procedure. In Romans 2 it is a figure about the heart, and it only works if the same phrase appears on both sides. It does here, once for the body and once for the heart. The mark in the middle of the line is the Burmese phrase separator, and the stroke at the end is the full stop.
နောက်တစ်ဖန် သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်သည် သူတို့အားလုံးအပေါ်သို့ ဆင်းသက်လာပြီး သူတို့သည် အခြားဘာသာစကားများဖြင့် ပြောဆိုလှုပ်ရှားကြသည်။
From the Danish Og Ånden faldt over dem alle sammen, og de begyndte at tale på andre sprog.
The Danish word can mean a spirit, a ghost, or a bottle of something strong, and here it is Acts chapter two. What came back is the full compound Burmese uses for the Holy Spirit, not a bare word for a spirit, and the same compound appears in the line above it. That consistency across two unrelated passages is the thing worth noticing.
သင်တို့သည် ကရုဏာတော်ကြောင့် ယုံကြည်ခြင်းအားဖြင့် ကယ်တင်ခြင်းကို ရရှိထားကြသည်၊ အဲဒါက သင်တို့ကိုယ်တိုင်မှ မရလာသည့်အရာ ဖြစ်ပြီး၊ ဒါဟာ ဘုရားသခင်၏ လက်ဆောင် ဖြစ်သည်။
From the Danish Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
The end of the verse is where generic tools give themselves away, turning saved into rescued and grace into ordinary kindness. This kept the shape of Ephesians two: not from yourselves, a gift. Look also at how the words are built, in stacked pieces rather than in a flat row of letters.
Produced with no glossary and no preparation at all. If your congregation uses particular Burmese wording for names or key terms, put it into Keywords once and it will be used exactly, every service.
There are two Burmese voices, one man and one woman, and for a good part of your guests they will be the whole product.
Burmese reading is close work. Round letters at small sizes, marks above and below, pieces stacked underneath one another, and no spaces to rest the eye on. A Burmese reader manages all of it without effort on a page. On a small screen, for forty minutes, in a room where everybody else is simply listening, it is work.
A voice removes that entirely. Your guest puts one earbud in and hears the talk in Burmese while the room carries on in its own language, and their eyes stay on the front where everybody else's are.
Burmese is also a tonal language, so the same sounds at different pitches are different words. That is not something a voice can approximate its way around, and it is one of the reasons to run the language properly rather than to reach for something nearby.
Choose the voice deliberately rather than accepting the default. In a room where several people are listening rather than reading, that choice is the service as far as they are concerned.
Three separate questions, and Burmese answers yes to all three.
A visiting Burmese preacher can speak Burmese and the room follows in whatever languages it needs. One of the 81 languages that can be the source, not only a destination.
Burmese script on the phone your guest already carries, or on the screen at the front through MulingDisplay, if your font is up to it. One of 182 languages that can be read.
Two Burmese voices, through an ordinary earbud. One of 81 languages that can be listened to rather than read.
Your guest joins by pointing a phone camera at a code on the welcome sheet. No account, no app, no card, and the listener screen is already in Burmese. This is what they see.
This is the most useful paragraph on the page, and it is the one most likely to be skipped.
Burmese is the majority language of Myanmar, but a very large share of the Christians from that country belong to peoples whose first language is not Burmese at all. Chin, Karen, Kachin and others have their own languages, their own hymn books and in several cases their own long church history. For many of them Burmese is a second language, learned at school.
So offering Burmese to somebody from Myanmar is not automatically the welcoming act it looks like. It can land as an assumption about who they are. Ask which language they would rather follow in, then use that one.
Not trivia. Each one changes what a good caption has to do.
Burmese has a full set of its own numerals, used alongside the ones you are reading now. Chapter and verse references are numbers, so it is worth glancing at how a reference looks in your captions before you rely on it from the front.
Burmese ends a sentence with one upright stroke and separates phrases with another. You can see both in the output further up this page. It is a small thing that makes badly handled Burmese text obvious to a native reader immediately.
Burmese puts the action at the end of the sentence. For live captions that is the whole problem: a system that emits words the moment it hears them produces a sentence with a hole in it. Ours waits until it has a complete unit of meaning and then sends that.
Only if the font on that machine covers Burmese, and a good many do not. Burmese also stacks pieces above and below the line, so a caption band cropped tight will clip them. Put a line of Burmese up for half a minute before the room fills. Empty boxes or clipped marks mean the font, not the translation.
Ask them. A large share of the Christians from that country speak Chin, Karen, Kachin or another language at home, and Burmese is their second language. Hakha Chin, S'gaw Karen, Mon and Shan are all available as captions, though not yet as a voice.
Yes, one of each, and you choose which. It is worth choosing rather than taking whatever comes up first, because for the guests who are listening rather than reading, that voice is the service.
It follows what is being said, which for a live talk means the spoken register rather than the formal literary one. That is the right choice for captions: they are speech written down, and the formal register puts distance where you do not want it.
After that a single gathering is a Service Pass, a whole day is a Day Pass, and a whole week is a Week Pass. A pass does not expire, and it is not spent unless somebody actually listens.
Each has a page of its own, with a hook of its own. The rest of the 183 are a row in the table.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket and one earbud.