There is no neutral word for you. You address someone as an older brother, an older sister, an aunt, a grandmother, a child, and you name yourself to match. Every sentence commits to a relationship. Get it wrong in one direction and you sound cold. Get it wrong in the other and you sound like somebody claiming a closeness they have not earned.
English gets away with you, we and he. Vietnamese does not have that luxury, and neither does anything translating into it. Every one of these has to be settled, live, in every sentence.
A preacher addressing a congregation says anh em, which means something close to brothers and sisters. It is warm without being familiar. A tool that reaches for the flat dictionary word for you lands on something that sounds like an official notice.
Vietnamese has a we that includes the person listening and a we that shuts them out. A preacher saying let us pray means the first. A translation that picks the second has quietly told the congregation this does not concern them.
He is not an it and not a mate. Vietnamese has a respectful word for an older man, and that is what a sermon uses of an apostle. The wrong choice is not incorrect grammar. It is bad manners, in public, on a screen.
This is not politeness in the decorative sense. It is the part of Vietnamese that tells the listener whether the speaker sees them. There is no way to skip it and no neutral setting to fall back on.
Six Danish lines were run into every language at once, the way a live room runs, and nothing has been touched since. Three of the Vietnamese ones are here. Look at the pronouns first.
Anh em được cứu nhờ ân điển bởi đức tin. Điều đó không đến từ anh em, nhưng là quà tặng của Đức Chúa Trời.
From the Danish Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
It chose anh em for you, the form a preacher uses to a congregation. Not the distant official form, not the familiar one you would use with a child. It also settled on the words for grace and for God that Vietnamese Protestant churches use.
Ông nói các việc làm của xác thịt thì quá rõ ràng, và chúng đối nghịch với bông trái của Thánh Linh.
From the Danish Kødets gerninger er tydelige nok, siger han, og de står i modsætning til Åndens frugt.
Han became Ông, the respectful term for an older man, because the man in question is Paul. And kød became xác thịt, the word Scripture uses, rather than thịt, which is what you buy at a butcher.
Nhưng hoàn toàn không có gì phải lo cả.
From the Danish Men der er ingen ko på isen. Vi når det, vi skal.
A Danish saying about there being no cow on the ice, which means there is nothing to worry about. Notice there is no you and no we in the Vietnamese at all. Vietnamese lets you leave the pronoun out, and when the relationship is not the point, leaving it out is the graceful choice.
Word for word, the first of these would have arrived with the flat dictionary you, the second would have called Paul by a pronoun you would use for a stranger in a queue, and the third would have been a sentence about a cow standing on ice.
Vietnamese Christian vocabulary split along the same line it split on in most languages, and Vietnamese kept the difference sharper than most. It is worth knowing which one your congregation grew up with.
Đức Chúa Trời
Thiên Chúa
Thánh Linh
Chúa Thánh Thần
ân điển
ân sủng
Our run came out in the first column. If your congregation is Catholic, put the words they expect into Keywords before the service and they will be used exactly, every time, in every language the room is running.
This matters in a church because the two groups do not always know each other, and because their Vietnamese is not quite the same Vietnamese.
They arrived mostly in western Europe, often through refugee programmes, often as whole families. Many are Catholic, many are Protestant, and the churches they formed have been running for decades. Their Vietnamese is, in places, the Vietnamese of the country they left, preserved.
They arrived mostly in central and eastern Europe under agreements between states, and many stayed and raised families. Some came to faith here rather than there. They are a different generation of arrival with a different vocabulary.
The pattern most churches notice first is inside one family. The children speak the local language better than they speak Vietnamese. The parents manage. The grandparents do not, and they are the ones sitting through an hour of sound with nothing in it for them. Nobody in that family will raise it, because they do not want to be a problem.
Three separate questions, and Vietnamese answers yes to all three.
A word about the voice. Vietnamese is tonal, and tone is not accent. The same syllable said at a different pitch is a different word. A voice that flattens tones does not sound foreign, it says something else. Ours holds them, and the honest test is to sit a Vietnamese speaker down with an earbud for two minutes and watch their face.
Almost all of this is about the oldest person in the group. Everyone else will be fine.
From what the sentence is doing and who it is aimed at. A sermon addressed to a gathered congregation is not the same act as one person speaking to another, and the translation is built to tell the difference. The output on this page is what it settled on, without anybody steering it.
Written Vietnamese is shared, so captions read naturally to both. The accent shows in the voice. If your congregation is strongly one or the other, listen to a session and tell us, because that feedback is worth more to us than any setting we could guess at.
It will lean Protestant unless you tell it otherwise, as the table above shows. Put your words into Keywords once and they hold for every service after that. It takes about two minutes and it is the single highest value thing a Vietnamese speaking church can do here.
Yes. Vietnamese can be the language on the stage as easily as one of the languages in the pews. A visiting Vietnamese speaker preaches, and everyone else reads or hears their own language at the same moment.
Each of these pages takes a real line from the same run and shows what that language had to work out before it could say it at all.
Or read how the translation itself works, in Smart Translation.
Open a room and let them listen; that is the whole test. Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone they already carry.