English and Spanish, in one service.

English churches with Spanish-speaking families

The sermon is preached in English. Parents and grandparents who are more at home in Spanish scan the church’s QR code, choose Español and read along, or, on paid plans, listen to an AI voice in Spanish through earbuds. Everyone else hears the service as before.

Hispanic churches whose children prefer English

The pastor preaches in Spanish. Teenagers and young adults who grew up in English read the sermon in English on their own phones, in the same pew as their parents, rather than in a separate service.

Bilingual services

When the pastor or a reader moves between English and Spanish, even in the middle of a sentence, Voclyn detects the language of each phrase by itself. English readers see the Spanish parts translated and the English parts as spoken, marked Original; Spanish readers see the reverse. How language switching works.

The original words appear on every phone as the pastor speaks, and each sentence is translated right after it ends. The same holds for a sentence that mixes Spanish and English. How we test.

Spanish captions are written in neutral Latin American Spanish and speak to the congregation as ustedes, not vosotros. The listener page addresses each person as usted: “Elija su idioma”.

Your church sets its own words once in the glossary, and both the speech engine and the translator follow them. Two Spanish starter packs fill the usual ones, one evangelical and one Catholic; in 2022, 43% of Hispanic adults in the US identified as Catholic (Pew Research Center).

For English readers, the English pack writes culto as “worship service”, Santa Cena as “the Lord’s Supper” and célula as “cell group”. Add your pastors’ names and your ministries too, so they read the same every week.

When the pastor names a passage and reads it, Spanish readers see it from the Reina-Valera 1909, word for word, marked “Texto publicado · no es IA” (Published text · not AI). English readers see the same passage from the Bible your church chose for English, the BSB or the KJV. The big screen shows the verse too, and the Spanish AI voice reads the verse itself rather than a translation.

The 1909 is not the Reina-Valera 1960 that most Spanish-speaking Protestant churches read; Spanish Wikipedia puts the RVR1960 in more than 85 percent of them. The 1909 is in the public domain and we have no licence for the 1960, so Spanish has this one Bible for now. The two are close, but readers will notice older spellings such as “ha dado á su Hijo”.

In our tests, a passage read aloud from the RVR1960 still brings up the card, because most of its words match; Spanish readers then see the 1909 text, named on the card. A paraphrase, or a reading the pastor never names, gets no card: it is translated like the rest of the sermon and labelled AI. How Scripture lock works.

For a bilingual service, put English and Spanish on the big screen as two bands, as a lower third over your slides in ProPresenter, or on the livestream in OBS. The screen shows whole sentences only, and the church’s QR code while people arrive. A lower-third link looks like this:

voclyn.com/your-church/screen?langs=en,es&layout=lower&bg=transparent&lines=2

The big screen comes with the paid plans; on Free, captions go to phones. Captions on the big screen.

The caption is a line from the sample service in our demo; on a phone, every translated caption is labelled Traducción con IA. The verse is the 1909 text exactly as Scripture lock shows it.

• The RVR1960 and other licensed Spanish Bibles aren’t shown; verse cards in Spanish come from the 1909 only.
• A sentence that switches language halfway can reach the other language in two or three pieces rather than one.
• The dashboard your team uses is in English; the listener page and the captions are in Spanish.
• The AI voice and the big screen aren’t part of the Free plan.