Real-time AI translation may be coming to church near you

(RNS) — John Mehl, a teaching pastor at Colorado’s Timberline Church, and Miguel Flores Robles, the drummer in the worship band at Timberline’s Windsor campus, get along well, even though they don’t understand each other’s language. Nor is Flores, who is only fluent in Spanish, able to communicate directly with the leader of the worship band he plays for, even as he enjoys Mehl’s sermons, which are in English. 

The answer to this riddle is artificial-intelligence real-time translation, a technology that has yet to become widespread in houses of worship but is already providing a way for congregations to welcome members who don’t speak their language.

Because he wanted Flores and other non-English speakers in the congregation to be able to better understand the service, Mehl went look for a translation solution about a year ago when he stumbled upon Wordly, an AI start-up founded in 2017 that catered mostly to people who run conferences at their first product launch in 2019.

He hoped Wordly would build bridges for the small group of non-English speakers, mostly Spanish speakers, among the 500 congregants who attend three weekend services at Timberline’s Windsor campus, a smaller offshoot of the thousands who attend the non-denominational church’s Fort Collins campus.

A quick Google search led him to Wordly. “ From the very beginning, we’ve always been a solution focused on how do we make it really easy and inexpensive or affordable for organizations of any size to be able to bring live translation to their meetings and events,” said Dave Deasy, Wordly’s chief marketing executive. The company’s clients now include about 200 U.S. houses of worship, mostly churches but also a few synagogues and mosques, which pay per minute of translation that includes some 60 different languages. 

John Mehl. (Photo courtesy Timberline Church)

It has transformed how non-English speakers relate to Timberline. Flores said he enters a code on his cellphone to listen to the sermon in Spanish through his headphones in real time. “It was the reason I feel more at ease in this place, because I can understand the preaching,” he said. “It’s helped me a lot to stay more informed, more confident.” It has made him feel comfortable inviting other Spanish speakers to join him at the church, he said.

Mehl has also facilitated a “reverse Wordly experience,” inviting a church member who speaks Spanish to deliver about eight minutes of a sermon in Spanish and asking English speakers in the pews to use Wordly to understand.

“ When language starts to be bridged, then all of a sudden, so many other ways to care for one another and recognize one another within a community, even though there are diversities, is a lot easier and a lot healthier,” said Mehl. Those relationships across language barriers spill out “into all areas of the community,” which Mehl sees as “Kingdom wins.”

AI translation for religious services is a new phenomenon, and Christian experts in AI ethics and multicultural ministry are just beginning to parse through their guidance for churches. Some had not heard of live AI translation in worship services before being contacted by RNS. 

Katalina Tahaafe-Williams, a multicultural ministry expert and Oceanian womanist theologian who previously worked with the World Council of Churches, cautioned that, within current practices globally, multicultural churches often coalesce around a common tongue, even if some members are less comfortable in the dominant language.

Kutter Callaway, associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is among the faculty spearheading the seminary’s guidance on AI, said that Christianity in particular is “incarnational,” leading to an emphasis on a human’s spoken words. The theologian explained, “Our bodies in space and time matter. And so when you worship, there is something about being connected to the other human bodies in the room.”

Kutter Callaway. (Photo courtesy Fuller Theological Seminary)

While he could imagine bringing in AI translation for the occasional larger event or for educational meetings, Callaway said, “ I do wonder if there is still something about worshipping together with people who are speaking the same language as you. I’m not sure how much AI or translation services like this would break people out of that silo.”

As an example he offered his own church, where three congregations — one English-speaking, one Spanish-speaking and one Armenian — share a building but seem content to worship in their own languages.

Tahaafe-Williams and Callaway also have deeper concerns about the social and ethical effects of translating worship with AI. Tahaafe-Williams, an Indigenous person who speaks the Polynesian language Tongan, said it is important in her community that the next generation is fluent in their tongue and that they have input in any uses of their language. AI translation “will be great if it works, but I also don’t want it to be a tool that de-skills migrants and Indigenous peoples,” she said.

Callaway and Tahaafe-Williams agreed that accuracy of translation should be a key concern for congregations considering using live AI translation. “When it comes to preaching as a form, what you’re saying and how you’re saying it should matter a lot,” said Callaway. “Christian theology historically is basically a whole bunch of Christians arguing about words,” which can fundamentally change a group’s understanding of who Jesus was, the theologian said.

Without knowing it, Timberline Windsor implemented Callaway and Tahaafe-Williams’ advice for ensuring accuracy, asking bilingual church members test the quality of Wordly’s translations.

Callaway also pointed to the ethical questions that many technologies raise, from how cellphones are made to the outsized energy usage of AI. He particularly highlighted that many AI translators go out and scrape up “ the real human translators out there, their work, and then (don’t compensate) them for that work.” Religious leaders have to ask, he said, “ is the usefulness in your ministry, does it justify the ethical questions that are raised?”

Mehl, the Timberline pastor, said Wordly’s customizable glossary gives Timberline’s Windsor campus some control over the translations of specific terms, and Wordly’s Deasy said that the quality of the translations “continues to get better and better over time” as his company’s team fine-tunes its product.

Mehl also said the service has the virtue of being inexpensive. Though a spokesperson for Wordly told RNS that the cost varies according to the number of users and the number of hours of translation used, a small church can expect to spend less than $5,000 a year.

(RNS illustration/Kit Doyle)

Other smaller companies advertise lower prices. OneAccord said its pricing starts at $150 a month for five hours, and Polyglossia chargesg $105 per month for 10 hours of translation of one language, along with a start-up cost.

The bottom line for Callaway, however, is not whether Christians can make AI work for them, but whether AI can be more Christian. He hopes that Christians will build relationships with AI engineers to steer the future of the technology, instead of just reacting to what the engineers create on their own.

Christians, he said, should “ think through what are the redemptive, the constructive, the life-giving ways we can leverage this technology as opposed to just simply saying technologists built something and then we figure out how we can use it.”