A Persian speaking family sits at the back. Nobody on stage speaks a word of Persian, and the sermon is about grace. Getting the language onto their phone takes a few minutes. Choosing which Persian is the thing a church should think about first, because a great many Persian speakers in European churches came to faith after they arrived, and ordinary religious vocabulary in Persian carries a history they left behind.
Three different questions, and for Persian all three have the same answer. That is not true of every language, so it is worth knowing.
Speak it. Your preacher can preach in Persian and the room follows in everything else.
Read it. Live captions on a phone, or on the big screen through MulingDisplay.
Hear it. A voice in the ear, so an older guest does not have to read for an hour.
Persian is written right to left. Every line, every caption, every menu in the listener app turns around properly. Nobody has to squint at a sentence running the wrong way.
Persian sits in the language list as fa, its own name فارسی. Dari, spoken in Afghanistan, is a separate entry, and so is Kurdish. If you are not sure which one your guest speaks, ask them, and see the full list.
This is the part of a Persian page that matters most, and it has nothing to do with technology. It is about not hurting somebody on their second Sunday.
Persian has a full religious vocabulary already, and most of it belongs to Islam. Using it in a Christian setting is not a small stylistic slip. To somebody who left one thing and found another, it can sound like the first thing followed them into the room.
The everyday Persian word for God, خدا, is shared and is what Persian speaking Christians say. The Islamic ritual prayer has its own word, نماز, and it is not the word for a Christian praying: that is دعا. Scripture is کتاب مقدس, the Holy Book. Baptism is تعمید. These distinctions are obvious to a Persian speaking believer and invisible to everybody else.
MulingStream translates a service with church vocabulary in mind, not general purpose text, which is why the lines further down land on فیض for grace and نجات for salvation rather than the everyday words for a favour and a rescue.
Say it plainly, because a church will hit this the first time it prints a welcome card.
It is meant kindly. It is meant to say, we see you, we made something for you. For a large part of this community it does not read that way at all. The emblem on the flag flown by the state today is tied to the country many of them left, and a good number identify instead with an older design carrying a lion and a sun. Whichever one goes on the card, somebody in the room will read it as a statement.
A language is not a country. There is no correct flag for Persian any more than there is one for Arabic or Spanish. Write the language in its own script, فارسی, and the person who needs it will find it in a second. This is not a setting you have to remember: MulingStream never shows a flag beside a language anywhere.
The safe move is to ask, not to guess. If you have one Persian speaking member already, show them the handout before you print two hundred of them. It takes five minutes and it is the difference between a welcome and a wince.
These are unedited. A Danish preacher said the sentence on the left, in a room running eight languages at once, and this is the Persian that reached the phones. Nothing was tidied up afterwards.
Said in Danish: Men der er ingen ko på isen. Vi når det, vi skal.
It is a Danish idiom meaning there is nothing to worry about. Swap each word for its nearest Persian match and your guest gets a cow standing on a frozen lake, and spends the next minute of the sermon working out what they missed.
اما اصلاً جای نگرانی نیست.
No cow, no ice. It says there is really nothing to worry about, in the Persian somebody would actually use.
Said in Danish: Og Ånden faldt over dem alle sammen, og de begyndte at tale på andre sprog.
The Danish word covers all three. A general purpose engine picks whichever meaning is most common in ordinary text, which is rarely the one being preached about on the day of Pentecost.
و روح بر همهٔ آنها نازل شد و آنها شروع کردند به سخن گفتن به زبانهای دیگر.
The Spirit, and the verb used for coming down upon, which is the verb a Persian speaking church uses for exactly this.
Said in Danish: Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
Grace and saved are two of the words generic translation gets wrong most reliably. It reaches for a favour granted and a person pulled out of danger. Neither is what the sentence means, and a Persian speaker who is new to church has no way of knowing that the tool slipped.
زیرا به فیض نجات یافتهاید، بهواسطهٔ ایمان، و این از خودِ شما نیست، بلکه بخششِ خداست.
فیض for grace, نجات for salvation, ایمان for faith, and God as خدا. That is the register a Persian speaking church uses, and it is the whole point.
Produced by the same path that runs a live room, with the church setting on, batched at eight target languages the way a real service runs. Read how that works on the Smart Translation page.
Persian uses a version of the Arabic script with several letters added for sounds Arabic does not have. It runs right to left, letters join up, and short vowels are usually not written at all, so a reader carries more of the work in their head than a Danish reader does.
Persian is one of 17 languages in MulingStream written right to left. Arabic is another, and the two look related on a screen while being entirely different languages underneath.
Churches care about this more than anything else on a page like this, because it decides what a sentence is supposed to sound like.
Persian speaking congregations tend to read from one of two kinds of translation. An older, formal one, whose language feels weighty and scriptural and which many longstanding believers quote from memory. And a modern one in contemporary Persian, which is usually what a newcomer is handed, because it can be read without a running start.
If your Persian speaking members quote the older translation and your captions arrive in plain modern Persian, the quotation will not match the phrasing in their head. It is not wrong, it is just unfamiliar at the moment they were expecting something they knew. Worth knowing before somebody mentions it to you.
Put the words your community actually uses into Keywords, and they stop being a guess. Names of people, the name of your church, the words your Persian speaking members prefer for the things you talk about every week.
Paste your outline or your reading into Context Enhancer. It arrives knowing the passage and the topic, the way a good interpreter reads the notes in the car park before the service.
Persian speakers turn up in European churches by several very different routes, and it is worth not assuming.
A large share of the Persian speakers a Nordic or European church meets left Iran, and a great many of them became Christians after arriving rather than before. That single fact shapes everything else. They are often new to church, new to the vocabulary, and carrying a caution about religious institutions that took years to earn.
Others are Afghan and speak Dari, which is close to Persian but has its own entry in the language list and its own preferred words. Some are Persian speaking Kurds, some are from Persian speaking families in the Caucasus or Central Asia. Some have been in Europe for decades and some arrived last month.
The practical consequence is small and useful: offer the language rather than assign it. Put Persian on the list, put Dari on the list, put Kurdish and Arabic on the list, and let each person choose their own on their own phone. Nobody has to declare anything to anybody.
Not trivia for its own sake. Each one changes how a sentence lands.
Persian does not mark he against she. One pronoun covers both. A Persian speaker learning Danish or English mixes them up constantly, and it means nothing at all about how carefully they are listening. It also means a Persian translation never has to guess a gender that the speaker never stated.
Lines from the great Persian poets are quoted in ordinary conversation the way proverbs are elsewhere, by people who never studied literature. If a Persian speaker in your church answers a question with a couplet, they are not showing off. That is just how the language argues.
Persian has a whole layer of courteous forms for speaking to someone you respect. A translation that ignores it is not wrong exactly, it is just blunt, and blunt is not what you want when a guest is being welcomed. Meaning first translation keeps the level of courtesy the speaker actually used.
It is translating a church service with the church setting on, so it reaches for the Christian register: فیض for grace, نجات for salvation, تعمید for baptism. It is not perfect and no tool is. If there is a word your Persian speaking members are particular about, put it in Keywords and it will be used every time, in every session, without anybody having to remember.
Yes. Persian is one of the languages MulingStream can listen to from the stage, so a Persian speaking guest preacher can preach in Persian while the Danish, English and Arabic speakers in the room follow on their own phones. It works in both directions and neither direction costs extra.
No. There is no flag that is neutral for this community, and choosing one will be read as a choice. Write the language in its own script, فارسی, and add the English word Persian underneath. MulingStream never shows a flag beside a language anywhere, for the same reason.
Let him choose. Dari is its own entry in the language list, and the two are close but not identical in vocabulary and in the words people prefer for religious things. Nobody has to be assigned a language: every listener picks their own on their own phone, and changing it takes one tap.
No, and this is the quiet part that matters most. A guest opens a link, picks Persian, and listens. Nobody is called out from the front, nobody has to raise a hand, and nobody has to explain themselves to a stranger at the door. Being included without being pointed at is the whole design.
Languages that often turn up in the same room, and the parts of MulingStream this page kept mentioning.
The other right to left language most European churches meet, with its own hard problem: what people call Arabic is a written standard nobody speaks at home.
Often in the same congregation as Persian speakers, and a language where we are honest that we do not yet reliably tell the varieties apart.
Why the lines above came out as sentences rather than as substituted words. It is how MulingStream translates, on every plan, from the first session.
A Service Pass covers one gathering, a Day Pass the whole day, a Week Pass seven days. Every pass carries as many languages as your guests need. Nothing expires.
Nothing to install, no card, and your Persian speaking guests need nothing but the phone already in their pocket.