Urdu Church Sermon Translation with Right to Left Captions

Pakistani churches and their children

Urdu-speaking congregations abroad often worship in Urdu and Punjabi while their children read English. Urdu preaching with English captions serves both in one service, and Punjabi can be added as a caption language or used as the speaker language.

What Sermon Translate does in Urdu

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

• There is no built-in Urdu church vocabulary yet. Bible references and church terms are translated with church context rather than matched to a standard Urdu form, so add your key names and terms to the church glossary.
• Verse popups cannot show the passage in Urdu 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.
• Urdu captions are laid out right to left.

The honest part

Urdu has no built-in church vocabulary in the app yet, not even Bible book names, so references are translated rather than matched to the names an Urdu Bible uses. The church glossary is the fix: add the Urdu book names and church terms your congregation uses, once.

• Urdu to English captions
• English to Urdu captions, right to left
• Glossary entries for Bible books, titles and ministries in Urdu

Try it with your own preacher

Use this month's 1 free hour on a real sermon with a native reader, and fix the words that come out wrong in the glossary before the first Sunday.

How a church sets up Urdu 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 Urdu 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

Are Urdu Bible book names built in?

No. Add the Urdu names you use to the church glossary and every translation will follow them.

Is Punjabi supported?

Yes. Punjabi can be the speaker language or a caption language.

Does the app speak the translation aloud?

No. It shows text captions only.

What does it cost to show Urdu 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 Urdu live?

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