German makes new words by welding old ones together, on the spot, in the middle of a sentence, and everybody in the room understands them instantly even though no dictionary has ever listed them. A tool that looks words up has nothing to look up. It still has to put something readable on a phone, one second later.
Neither of them is unusual German. Both happen several times in any ordinary sermon, and neither is a problem for a person in the room.
Compounding in German is open ended. A speaker joins two, three or four existing nouns into one and the result is a real German word with a precise meaning, even though it has never been written down anywhere. Gnadengeschenk. Herzensbeschneidung. Sonntagmorgengottesdienst. Nobody in the pews blinks.
A tool matching strings finds nothing, so it either drops the word, guesses at the whole thing, or splits it badly and produces a phrase that means something else.
German puts the working part of the verb at the end of a subordinate clause, and separable prefixes come off and land at the very end of the sentence. Until that last word turns up you do not know whether the speaker is calling, calling off, calling up or calling back.
Translate as you go, word by word, and you have committed to a meaning before the sentence has told you which one it is.
The fix is not a bigger word list. It is waiting for the sentence, understanding it, and then saying it again properly in the other language. That is what a human interpreter does, and it is why they do not translate one word at a time either.
German has practical demands that a language of short words does not, and they are all about space.
On a phone that is a wrapping question. On a screen at the front of a hall it is a layout question, and a German caption needs room given to it rather than taken away.
All three directions, which most of the 183 languages cannot manage.
One of the 81 languages a gathering can be run in. Your speaker uses the microphone that is already there and changes nothing about how they speak.
One of the 182 that can be read live, with the capitals, the umlauts and the ß where they belong.
One of the 81 that arrive as a voice in the ear instead, for anybody who is not going to read for an hour.
This website, the sign-up and your guest's join screen are published in German as well.
Unedited output from the live path, from a Danish sermon source. Look at the capitals in each one: every noun, correctly, without being told.
Kødets gerninger er tydelige nok, siger han, og de står i modsætning til Åndens frugt.
The Danish source, Galatians chapter five. Match the words and Fleisch is what you buy for dinner, which turns a passage about human nature into a shopping list.
Die Werke des Fleisches sind deutlich genug, sagt er, und sie stehen im Gegensatz zur Frucht des Geistes.
Werke des Fleisches and Frucht des Geistes are set phrases a German congregation knows by ear. Getting either one nearly right is worse than useless: it sounds like somebody who has never been in the room.
Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
The Danish source, Ephesians chapter two. The nearest general word for grace is the one a court grants, and the nearest word for saved is pulled out of a river.
Aus Gnade seid ihr durch den Glauben gerettet, und das kommt nicht aus euch, es ist Gottes Gabe.
Ihr and euch, not Sie. That is the register a German congregation expects from a reading, and it was not set in a menu beforehand. It came from what the sentence was doing.
Real, unedited output from the same path that runs a live room. How translation from meaning works
These are not obscure. They are the everyday furniture of a German service, and each has a plain meaning a word matcher will reach for first.
The Holy Spirit. Also a ghost. Also the mind or intellect, as in a brilliant one. Three quite different sentences depending on which is meant, and only the context decides.
The congregation, the body of people. It is also the municipality, the local authority that empties the bins. One word, and the difference between a family and a council district.
Grace, as a church means it. Also clemency, the kind granted from above to somebody who deserved worse. The second reading is a very different theology arriving quietly.
Meat. Also flesh in the biblical sense, human nature set against the Spirit. Only one of those belongs in Galatians and both are the same word.
Salvation, and also wholeness or wellbeing. It also carries a heavy twentieth century shadow in German that it carries in no other language, which is a reason to be careful rather than a reason to avoid it.
Your building, your people, the compound your congregation invented years ago and now uses without thinking. Put those in Keywords and they survive intact into every language.
German is the everyday language of Germany, Austria and much of Switzerland, plus congregations well beyond them. In writing that is one shared standard, and captions are the same for everybody.
Out loud it is a wider spread. Austrian German differs in vocabulary and rhythm in ways Germans notice immediately. Spoken Swiss German is a much bigger step: Swiss speakers generally move to standard German for anything public, and when they do, they are handled like any other accent.
The register question is the one that catches people out. German has to choose between formal and familiar address before it can say almost anything, and there is no neutral option to hide behind. A reading, a prayer and an announcement are not all the same choice.
Luther's Bible is widely credited with shaping the modern written German standard, which is an unusual thing for a church to be able to say about its own national language: the words your congregation reads and the words your country writes came out of the same work.
A general tool learns German from how German is used today, which is journalism, technical writing and messaging. It will faithfully flatten a reading into modern plain prose. Every word will be right and the passage will not sound like scripture.
A reading should arrive as a reading, an announcement as an announcement, and a prayer as a prayer. Share your outline beforehand with Context Enhancer and the room knows which of those is coming before it starts.
Six more with pages of their own. Dutch is the closest of them, and the closeness is exactly where it goes wrong.
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A made-up compound is not a lookup problem, it is a meaning problem, and it is handled as one: the pieces are read and the sense is carried into the other language. That is precisely what a listener does the first time they hear one too. If your congregation has coined a compound of its own that must always come out a particular way, put it in Keywords.
In the unedited run published above it used ihr and euch, the informal plural, which is what a German congregation expects from a reading. The choice follows what the sentence is doing rather than a setting you have to remember.
In writing, no. The written standard is shared and the captions are identical for all three countries. Spoken Swiss German is a much bigger step away from it, and a Swiss speaker who moves to standard German for the microphone is handled like any other accent.
A German caption block is bigger, because the same sentence is longer. It wraps rather than truncating, and on a screen at the front of a hall it is worth giving German a little more room than a language of short words.
Yes, including the sign-up and the screen your guests join on, so a volunteer setting up a room never has to do it in English.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guests need nothing but the phone already in their pocket.