How to translate your church livestream.

A fourth way costs nothing extra: put your church’s Voclyn link in the stream’s description. Viewers at home open it on their phone and read or listen in their own language. Their captions follow the room live, so they run ahead of the video by however much the stream is delayed.

YouTube can caption a live stream automatically, but its help page says live automatic captions are available in English only, work only at normal latency, and are rolling out to channels with more than 1,000 subscribers. It also warns that automatic captions can misrepresent what was said because of accents or background noise.

So YouTube’s own captions help viewers who follow English and want to read it, such as people who are deaf or hard of hearing. They don’t translate the sermon for viewers who need another language. YouTube also accepts captions from an encoder or a captioning service, but its help page says a live stream carries one caption track: one language.

After the stream, YouTube makes new automatic captions for the recording, which may differ from the live ones.

You can run a second stream that carries an interpreter’s voice instead of the pastor’s. Viewers hear a person, and it works on any platform. It also takes the most effort:

• An interpreter for each language, every week, and someone to cover when they are away.
• A second output from your streaming software, or a second computer, and upload bandwidth for each stream.
• A separate link, chat and recording for each language, and viewers who have to find the right one.

The interpreters’ time is the largest cost: the US median wage for interpreters and translators was $28.93 an hour in May 2025. What each option costs over a year.

1. In Voclyn, copy your room’s screen link for OBS: voclyn.com/<your-link>/screen?layout=lower&bg=transparent&lines=2. Your church’s link replaces <your-link>.
2. Choose the languages: add &langs=es for Spanish, or &langs=es,ko for Spanish and Korean. A lower third holds up to two languages; the full-screen layout holds three.
3. In OBS, select the scene you stream, click + under Sources and add a Browser source.
4. Paste the link into URL, and set Width to 1920 and Height to 1080 to match a 1080p canvas. OBS starts at 800 × 600.
5. Leave Custom CSS as it is: its default makes the page’s background see-through.
6. Drag the source above your camera in the Sources list, so the captions sit over the picture.
7. Prefer a green key? Use bg=chroma instead, and add a Chroma Key filter to the source.
8. Before the service, the source shows your QR code and link, so viewers at home can scan it too. Captions appear when the desk goes live, in whole sentences.

Every link option, with troubleshooting, is on OBS live translation. For the screen in the room, see ProPresenter.

• Run a rehearsal from the sound desk and watch the captions in OBS’s preview, not only on a phone.
• Check the size on a phone screen: two lines read more easily than three.
• Make sure the source is in every scene you stream, or in a nested scene the others share.
• The screen link comes with the paid plans and the 30-day trial. On Free it shows a notice instead of captions.
• If nothing appears, check that the room is live at the desk, then refresh the browser source.

• Captions in the picture are there for every viewer: nobody can switch them off or choose another language. Viewers who want another language can open your church’s link on their phone.
• Each sentence appears right after it ends, once it has been translated. Whole sentences only, so nothing flickers while the pastor speaks.
• Because they are part of the picture, the captions stay in the recording.
• Each language is marked as AI translation. A reading the pastor names is shown from a published Bible in English, Spanish, Korean, Cantonese and Mandarin, cited with its version.
• Voclyn doesn’t put the AI voice into your stream. Viewers at home can listen to it on their own phone from your church’s link.