Swahili Church Sermon Translation for East African Congregations

One service for Kiswahili speakers and English speakers

Swahili-speaking churches often gather believers from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Congo and beyond, with children who read English best. The pastor can preach in Swahili with English captions on the screen, or preach in English with Swahili captions.

• Swahili preaching, English captions
• English preaching, Swahili captions
• Kinyarwanda, Luganda, Amharic and other African caption languages available for families who read them better

What Sermon Translate does in Swahili

Swahili works in both directions: a preacher can speak Swahili into the app, and members can read the sermon in Swahili.

• The 66 Bible book names are built in for Swahili, taken from a published Swahili Bible, so a spoken book name comes out the way that Bible writes it. Other church vocabulary is general translation guided by church context, and your church glossary fixes the terms that matter to you.
• Verse popups cannot show the passage in Swahili yet, because the Bible editions connected today cover only English, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Farsi / Persian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German and Filipino / Tagalog.

Refugee and resettlement ministry

Churches that sponsor families from East and Central Africa can use Conversation Mode for the first home visit: two people, two languages, one phone, each half of the screen showing the other person's words translated.

Before the first service

Test with your own preacher using this month's 1 free hour, give the laptop a clean sound feed, and put the names of your pastors, choirs and fellowships into the church glossary.

How a church sets up Swahili captions for a service

One laptop, tablet or phone near the pulpit does the work. Give it clean sound from the sound desk or a microphone close to the preacher, sign in, choose the language being preached and Swahili as a reading language, and start. The room reads the captions on the projector through the Subtitles screen, online viewers see them in the livestream through the OBS overlay, and members who prefer their own phone scan a QR code with QR Code Join, included in every plan, and read with no account.

• Before the service: add names, ministries and church terms to the glossary, and choose a Bible version for verse popups
• During the service: keep the device on power and online; captions follow the preaching sentence by sentence
• After the service: the transcript is saved to the account, and the Standard plan turns it into AI sermon notes

Where do the Swahili Bible book names come from?

The 66 book names were taken from the Swahili Union Version, so a spoken book name comes out the way that Bible writes it.

Can the pastor switch between Swahili and English in one sermon?

The app listens for the speaker language you choose, so a sermon that switches languages often is harder to caption well. Test your preacher's style with the free monthly hour.

Can a verse popup show the Swahili Bible text?

Not yet. The Bible editions connected to verse popups today cover English, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Farsi / Persian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German and Filipino / Tagalog.

What does it cost to show Swahili captions every Sunday?

Every account gets 1 free hour every month of live translation, enough to test a full service. Basic is $19.99 a month for 12 hours and Standard is $34 a month for 30 hours. Free and Basic include one reading language, Standard includes two and All Languages includes every language. Each language beyond that uses another hour of plan time for every hour of the service.

Can an English sermon be translated into Swahili live?

Yes. Choose English, or the language your pastor preaches in, as the speaker language and Swahili as the reading language. Swahili can also be preached into the app, so a Swahili sermon can be read in English or another language.