Live Armenian translation in church: what to expect, honestly

Armenian works, but it is not a language where every vendor is equally good, and a demo in English tells you nothing about it. Ask to hear it on a real Armenian sermon before you decide anything.

Why Armenian is different

The big languages have decades of recorded speech behind their recognition models. Armenian has far less, is split between Eastern and Western forms, and carries a liturgical register that most training data never saw. The result is that a system which sounds flawless in Spanish can mishear an Armenian sermon in ways that flip a sentence’s meaning, and the listener has no way to know.

Translation into Armenian is the easier direction. Recognising Armenian speech well enough to translate out of it is the hard one, and it is where the differences between vendors are largest.

What good looks like

• The vendor tells you which tier Armenian lands in for voice and for captions, rather than claiming every language is the same.
• The system can be told how your church says names, places and scripture terms in Armenian, and a person approves what it learned.
• You can hear it on your own preacher, in your own hall, before you sign.
• Obvious slips are corrected on screen and in the transcript, rather than left standing.

Questions for the first conversation

How Sanctavo does it

Armenian is one of the four languages Sanctavo carries every Sunday in Vienna, and it is the language we have worked on hardest. Recognition of Armenian speech runs on an engine chosen for that language rather than on a single default for every language, and the church’s glossary carries its own Armenian forms of names and scripture into every translation. We say plainly which tier a language lands in; pretending Armenian sounds like Spanish helps nobody.

We set it up free on one of your services. Have somebody who preaches in Armenian read the transcript afterwards; that is the test that matters.