Afghanistan has two official languages, Pashto and Dari, and they are not two ways of saying the same thing. They belong to different branches, they are written with different sets of letters, and the families who speak them are usually not the same families. Putting the wrong one in front of a guest is not a near miss. It is a stranger reading them a page they cannot use.
Both are official. Neither is a dialect of the other. Getting this right takes one question at the door.
Pashto is an Iranian language, but it sits some distance from Persian: different grammar, a great deal of vocabulary a Persian speaker would not follow, and sounds that needed new letters invented for them. It is widely spoken in the south and east of Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan.
Dari is much closer to Persian, and in writing the two are nearly the same. It is the language of Kabul and the north, and of many Hazara, Tajik and other Afghan families. The Dari page covers it properly, including a gap you should know about before Sunday.
Plenty of Afghans use both, and plenty use one. Some are more comfortable in Pashto but read better in Dari, or the other way round. The only reliable method is to ask, and to accept the answer without improving on it.
All three directions. This is worth comparing against the Dari page, because the two are not equal today.
Yes. A Pashto-speaking preacher or testimony can come from the front, and the rest of the room receives it in whatever languages you are running.
Yes, right to left, correctly aligned, on a phone or on the big screen. Pashto is one of the 17 right to left languages we run, and the direction is handled properly rather than bolted on.
Yes, male or female, in one earphone. For guests who read little, this is the difference between attending a service and following one.
The listener screen itself is published in Pashto, so a guest is not navigating an English menu to reach their own language.
Pashto uses an Arabic-derived script, written right to left, with a set of extra letters made specifically for sounds that Arabic and Persian do not have.
Those extra letters are why Pashto text is not simply Persian text with different words in it, and why a system that treats every right to left language as one problem produces something a Pashto reader finds subtly wrong.
One of them is even a regional marker. The letter written ښ is pronounced differently in the south west than in the north east, which is the well known split between the softer and harder ways of speaking Pashto. Both read the same written form, which is convenient: the writing is shared even where the speech is not.
On a screen, the practical requirements are ordinary ones. Give the caption band enough height, do not squeeze it into a thin strip, and let the text run in its own direction. Everything else is handled.
Unedited output from the same path a live room uses, translating from Danish. Read by someone before it was allowed onto this page.
Your speaker says, in Danish: Omskærelsen er ikke den ydre på kroppen, men hjertets omskærelse ved Ånden.
Read plainly this is a medical procedure. In Romans chapter two it is a figure about the heart. A tool that does not know which book it is in sends the procedure, and it sends it to every language in the room at the same moment.
ختنه يوازې هغه ظاهري عمل په بدن کې نه دی، بلکې د روح له لارې د زړه ختنه ده.
The outward act set against the circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit. The figure survives intact, which is the only part the listener needs.
And the sentence a congregation would notice immediately: Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
Generic engines turn grace into ordinary kindness and saved into rescued. Both pass a dictionary check. Neither is the word a church has built its vocabulary on, and a listener hears the substitution at once.
تاسو د ايمان له لارې د فضل په وسيله ژغورل شوي ياست. دا له تاسو نه دي، دا د خدای ډالۍ ده.
It reached for fazl, the word used for grace rather than the everyday word for kindness, and closed on the gift of God rather than something God happened to do. That is the register a sermon is in.
No preparation, no glossary, no second attempt. Give it your outline beforehand with Context Enhancer and it starts the service already knowing your passage and your names.
There is a Pashto voice, and you can choose a man or a woman. It speaks the translated sentence into your guest's ear while the service carries on at the front.
Reading is not the easy option for everybody. Among Afghan guests in Europe there are people who speak Pashto fluently and read it slowly, or not at all, and asking them to follow forty minutes of running text is asking them to work while everybody else rests.
A voice removes that entirely. One earphone, so they keep the other ear on the room, the singing and the person next to them. Nobody around them can tell it is happening.
Two assumptions worth dropping before you plan anything.
The first assumption is that a Pashto speaker is Afghan. Many are, and many are not: Pashto is spoken by a very large population across the border in Pakistan, and a Pashto-speaking guest in a European church may have arrived by an entirely different route and for entirely different reasons.
The second is that Afghan congregations in Europe arrived together. They did not. People came in waves separated by decades, under different circumstances, and a single fellowship can hold someone who has been here twenty years and someone who arrived last spring. They may share a country and almost nothing else, including which of the two languages they want.
Running Pashto and Dari at the same time costs no more than running one. That is the simplest way to stop the question from becoming a decision somebody has to make on a guest's behalf.
Three things, in order. The first one is the one everybody gets wrong.
Not which country. Show them both names written down, Pashto and Dari, and let them point. Inside one family the answer can differ between the parents and the teenagers, and both answers are correct.
Lead with an earphone rather than a screen. If they would rather read, they will say so, and the captions are there. Starting with the voice means nobody has to admit anything about reading.
No names from the front, no faces on social media, no listener list read aloud. Many Afghan Christians have family who must not know. This costs you nothing and it may cost them a great deal.
Nothing is stored unless you deliberately turn recording on. For a congregation where discretion is not optional, the security page sets out exactly what is kept and for how long, in plain terms.
Ask, and show both names written in their own scripts so they can point rather than pronounce. If they say either is fine, run both: it costs the same, and their family may not agree with them.
Yes, along with every other language your room needs, all at once. Language count is never a price lever here, so there is no version of this where somebody is left out to save money.
No. Dari and Persian are close. Pashto is not close to either, and a Persian translation is not a usable substitute for a Pashto speaker. The Persian page explains where that line sits.
More useful, not less. Pashto has a voice, so they listen rather than read. Hand them an earphone and nothing else is required of them.
Yes. Direction and alignment are handled from the language itself, not patched afterwards. Give the caption band real height rather than a thin strip and it looks the way it should.
Start with the two Afghan languages together. Everything else can run alongside them at the same time.
Or open the full list of 183 and check the three columns for what each language can actually do.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guests need nothing but a phone and one earphone.