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Church Translation & Accessibility
Church Translation & Accessibility
Create foretastes of God’s Kingdom in your church by including many languages.
“After this I looked and saw a multitude too large to count, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” (Rev 7:9)
Why church translation?
Belonging
Create belonging in your church across cultures, languages, abilities, and generations.
Worship
Help people worship God in their heart languages, together as one body.
Witness
Witness God uniting people of every nation, tribe, and language through your church.
Will it work for your church?
From church plants to multi-site churches, our church translation system can adapt and scale to your unique situation. Select your church type below to discover how we can help.
Want to dive deep into church translation?
Check out our comprehensive pastor’s guide to multilingual ministry or download a 1-page PDF to print and share.
“When we first started doing it, there was one woman who had been coming for six months, is not a believer, but loved the way she was loved, she just really appreciated being prayed over, but she didn’t understand a whole lot of what was going on until the first time we did spf.io. And the whole time I was preaching, she was like, elbowing the person next to her and smiling and nodding and pointing at the screen, and at the end of the service, she said, This is the first time I felt included.“
– Pastor Chris Sicks
Founder of One Voice Fellowship
“Whereas before, maybe we can only have 20 people listening, now, it’s unlimited. Before we could only have two languages broadcast at a time, [and] now it is over 60 languages. Before, you needed a human translator per language group, but now you need one operator for 60 languages.“
– Briana Southerland
Share Ministries Pastor at First Alliance Church, Calgary
“It was very easy to set up, and the quality is great.
I was also surprised at how little lag there is.“
– Cameron D.
Staff at Overlake Park Presbyterian Church
Ethnic churches offer a vital space for immigrants and refugees to feel at home. As these churches grow, they face the challenge of engaging younger generations who may feel disconnected from their parents’ language and traditions. As third culture kids, they face unique challenges in upholding their heritage while integrating with the majority culture.
“I got to say, we’re very pleased. Our people like the way that it works. We’ve been able to put together a sequence of events that we run through each week of how we stick the information into the program, edit the translations, and then get it ready for presentation on Sunday. And people seem to be pretty quick to adopt using their handhelds and reading through the sermon as we go, so it’s been great.”
– Todd Blackhurst
Pastor at Taichung International Fellowship
“It makes voting so easy [and] convenient. I’m really grateful that we’re using this platform. [It’s] easy to count votes, easy to keep the meeting moving, and to incorporate in a hybrid model where we have people in person and online.”
– Rev. Lora East
Associate Pastor at Pacific Presbytery
“With the spf.io Convo app, now we’re able to have multiple people on a call in a group setting where we’re speaking different languages, even more than two, and we’re able to actually share our experiences, faith, and cultural expressions with one another.”
– Pastor Steven Zapolski
Founder of United Community Church
Want to dive deep into church translation?
Check out our comprehensive pastor’s guide to multilingual ministry or download a 1-page PDF to print and share.
What can you do with spf.io?
Here are four capabilities you can get from our all-in-one church translation system.
Make worship services accessible in 100+ languages
Make worship services accessible in 100+ languages
Deliver live speech-to-speech translation (and captions) for in-person, online, or hybrid worship services. Display captions and translations on big screens and people’s mobile devices, or embed them on your website, app, or livestream.
Stream spoken interpretation or assistive listening directly to people’s smartphones or embed it on your website and apps without extra equipment.
Translate your slides and songs with just a few clicks. From one control, easily show slides and songs on big screens and on people’s mobile devices in their language.
Quickly translate sermon recordings & other content
Quickly translate sermon recordings & other content
Easily add captions and subtitles to your audio and videos in many languages, all in one place. Edit them to perfection and export to multiple formats.
Automatically translate documents such as articles, sermon manuscripts, handouts, training materials, and dockets in many languages. Manage your content & translation team in one place.
Automatically translate your polls so people can vote in their own language for in-person, virtual, or hybrid meetings.
Connect people through Bible studies & small groups in many languages
Connect people through Bible studies & small groups in many languages
Create belonging for people in many languages by providing real time translation & captions of Bible studies, prayer meetings, and 1:1 conversations. Let people pray and speak freely in their heart language while being understood by their neighbors.
Grow your multilingual community
Grow your multilingual community
Track engagement metrics to understand and measure impact. See how translations are being used, which languages have the highest engagement, and how effectively you’re reaching different communities to make data-driven decisions for your ministry.
How does church translation work?
Here’s an example of how spf.io can translate your worship service.
Deliver your sermon
Preach from a manuscript or speak freely into a microphone/audio input connected to spf.io.
Display on mobile devices
People can see slides, read or listen to the translation, and easily share quotes on social media.
Display on a big screen
Projector views can show up to four translated languages as well as slides or video.
Display on a live stream
Embed the audience view side-by-side with your live stream or as subtitles beneath your video on your website.
Deliver your sermon
Preach from a manuscript or speak freely into a microphone/audio input connected to spf.io.
Display on mobile devices
People can see slides, read or listen to the translation, and easily share quotes on social media.
Display on a big screen
Projector views can show up to four translated languages as well as slides or video.
Display on a live stream
Embed the audience view side-by-side with your live stream or as subtitles beneath your video on your website.
Integrate with your existing platforms or apps
Add live church translation to your existing tools. We integrate with platforms and apps like Zoom, YouTube, OBS, Streamyard, Rock Mobile app, and Church Online Platform to route the audio of multiple speakers into spf.io to generate captions through Cloud Loopback.
We believe God’s Word matters.
That’s why we offer tools and services that help you reach the translation quality your community needs.
Human-in-the-loop tools
Captioner
Manuscript mode
Audio livestreaming
Review and edit captions in real time to ensure accuracy. Your corrections help the AI produce higher quality captions and translations over time.
AI adaptation tools
Vocabulary fine-tuning
Fine-tune spf.io’s language AI to your church’s vocabulary.
Custom AI models
Build custom AI models based on your church’s needs.
Improved Accuracy of Church-Specific Terms
Use the Keyword Booster to enhance speech recognition of church-specific terminology to get more accurate transcriptions. Keyword groups for different chapters in the Bible in English are available to boost so you don’t have to input each Biblical term manually. Learn how to enable this feature in your session.
Maintain Brand Consistency
Do Not Translate ensures specific words and phrases such as your church’s name are not translated into the target language in your transcriptions, media files, and conversations.
Safer Captions and Translations
Profanity Filter blocks any offensive, abusive, or profane words across many languages from appearing in your transcriptions. You can customize it to match your needs.
Custom Glossary
Use the Autoreplacement Database to automatically replace incorrect variations of words or phrases for more accurate captions and translation.
Professional services and training
Deliver a high-quality experience for your multilingual congregation with services and training that support your church’s needs.
On-call Support & Remote Operators
We’ll monitor and assist your team in addressing potential technical issues during your event. Request one of our trained remote operators to review and edit captions in real time.
Event Preparation & Tech Checks
Our customer support team will assist you or your operator to set up spf.io and ensure everything runs smoothly before your event.
Multilingual Strategy Consulting & Training
Our instructor-led training equips your team to get maximum benefit from our platform. You can dive deep with our strategy consultants to grow your multilingual community.
Translation & Transcription Services
Request one of our post-editors to review and refine translation for documents, slides, and audio and video transcription.
Professional Captioners and Interpreters
We provide professional interpreters and captioners trained to use spf.io’s assisted captioning feature or CART to translate captions into many languages automatically.
AI Customization
We can build custom AI models for speech recognition, machine translation, voice replication and more. Let us know your vision for AI and we can help make it possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does spf.io cost?
Spf.io’s pricing varies based on your usage, such as the number of languages, worship services, and attendees. It’s significantly more affordable than traditional headset systems, where you need to purchase and maintain separate equipment for each person. With spf.io, attendees simply use their own smartphones, making it easy and cost-effective to scale up as your multilingual needs grow.
Our subscription plans start at just $99/month. Fill out the Request a Demo & Quote form to schedule a discovery call. We’ll help you find the right solution through a needs assessment and tailor our church translation system to your needs.
Does spf.io require a tech person?
If you don’t have a tech person, we provide training for any of your staff and volunteers on how to set up and leverage our features for events, content, and conversations. A typical worship service only requires one to two people to operate spf.io. The most critical role to collaborate with is an audio engineer who can ensure high-quality audio is fed into spf.io. Here’s a quick setup guide to help you get started.
We also provide optional professional services that range from providing captions and translations in real time to post-production of captions and subtitles on videos to developing custom AI models.
What equipment do I need to use spf.io?
Here are the minimum technical equipment requirements to use spf.io’s live church translation system:
- Processor: 1.6 GHz Dual-core CPU
- Memory: 4GB RAM / 4GB Free disk space
- Browser: Support for Google Chrome 80
- Operating System: Windows 10 or later, MacOS Mojave or later, or Chrome OS 90 or later
- Network: 1 Mbps download/upload Internet connection speed (when the network is in use during a live event). Test venue internet with an internet speed test.
- Audio: Ability to receive audio input over USB. Learn more about the audio setup here.
These requirements apply to spf.io operators, interpreters, and other producer roles.
Contact us if you have any questions about these requirements.
What languages does spf.io support?
Spf.io’s church translation system supports over 100 languages. Here’s the full list:
| Abkhaz Acehnese Acholi Afrikaans Albanian Alur Amharic Arabic Armenian Assamese Awadhi Aymara Azerbaijani Balinese Bambara Bashkir Basque Batak Karo Batak Simalungun Batak Toba Belarusian Bemba Bengali Betawi Bhojpuri Bikol Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Buryat Cantonese Catalan Cebuano Chichewa (Nyanja) Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Chuvash Corsican Crimean Tatar Croatian Czech Danish Dinka Divehi Dogri Dombe Dutch Dzongkha English |
Esperanto Estonian Ewe Fijian Filipino (Tagalog) Finnish French French (French) French (Canadian) Frisian Fulfulde Ga Galician Ganda (Luganda) Georgian German Greek Guarani Gujarati Haitian Creole Hakha Chin Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hiligaynon Hindi Hmong Hungarian Hunsrik Icelandic Igbo Iloko Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kapampangan Kazakh Khmer Kiga Kinyarwanda Kituba Konkani Korean Krio Kurdish (Kurmanji) Kurdish (Sorani) |
Kyrgyz Lao Latgalian Latin Latvian Ligurian Limburgan Lingala Lithuanian Lombard Luo Luxembourgish Macedonian Maithili Makassar Malagasy Malay Malay (Jawi) Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Meadow Mari Meiteilon (Manipuri) Minang Mizo Mongolian Myanmar (Burmese) Ndebele (South) Nepalbhasa (Newari) Nepali Northern Sotho (Sepedi) Norwegian Nuer Occitan Odia (Oriya) Oromo Pangasinan Papiamento Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Portuguese (Portugal) Portuguese (Brazil) Punjabi Punjabi (Shahmukhi) Quechua |
Romani Romanian Rundi Russian Samoan Sango Sanskrit Scots Gaelic Serbian Sesotho Seychellois Creole Shan Shona Sicilian Silesian Sindhi Sinhala (Sinhalese) Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swati Swedish Tajik Tamil Tatar Telugu Tetum Thai Tigrinya Tsonga Tswana Turkish Turkmen Twi (Akan) Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Yucatec Maya Zulu |
What translation methods can I use for my worship services?
There are four methods that you can use with our live church translation system:
- Autopilot: Show automatic AI-generated captions and translations in real time. Features like autoreplacements and profanity filters are included for safer use.
- Manuscript: Upload your script to spf.io in advance. Pastors can preach from their iPads or tablets and release the translation line by line during the worship service. Translations can be displayed on big screens or people’s mobile devices.
- Supervised AI: Have a human in the loop to edit real-time captions for higher-quality live translations. If you don’t have anyone from your staff or volunteers to supervise the AI, you can request one of our remote operators to do it for your worship services.
- Interpreter subtitling: If you already have an interpreter, you can stream your interpreter’s spoken interpretation to spf.io and get it automatically captioned.
The advantage of using supervised AI and adding autoreplacements is that the AI can learn from any corrections you make to improve future translations.
If you prerecord a sermon that is played back during a worship service, you can use our AVCS product to automatically caption and translate it for playback.
Are there other parts of a worship service that can be translated?
Yes, spf.io can translate more than just sermons. You can use the platform to translate slides, Scripture, worship songs, and more, into different languages. For unscripted portions like announcements, you can use spf.io’s autopilot to caption and translate the speech of the person who is speaking.
What happens if someone shows up at my worship service speaking a language I haven’t prepared for?
If an attendee speaks a language you haven’t prepared for, you can turn on translation on-demand and autopilot. They can select their language, and the AI will generate automatic captions and translations in real time. While this method doesn’t involve a human in the loop, it provides a valuable accessibility measure, giving them an understanding of your sermon or service.
Do I have control over how my data is used to train the custom AI models?
As part of our AI tenets, you have control over your data. Any videos you upload, text you generate, and events you run through spf.io produce data that you can use to improve the quality and usability of the AI in the future. You can even delete the data for the sake of privacy.
When we train custom machine translation models or create custom voice models, the data you provide to train these models belongs to you. The models needed to generate translations or speech are hosted in our systems, but the training data is yours.
Spf.io provides tools to input and manage your data in our systems so that they can solve your problems more effectively in conjunction with AI.
Contact us if you’re interested in building a custom AI model tailored to your church’s needs.
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Make your church accessible in any language!
Schedule a call to assess your needs and get a tailored multilingual solution for your church.