The church glossary: forty words that carry a year of sermons

If live translation in your service gets the sentence right and the name wrong, you do not need a better engine. You need forty words written down. The names of the people on the platform, the way your tradition writes a verse reference, the handful of theological terms your congregation has already settled on in each language: that is the list, and it takes about an hour to write. Everything else a translation system can work out for itself. These forty it cannot. What a list will not do is catch a sentence that stays fluent and flips a condition: that is a different fault with a different cause, and conflating the two is how churches end up disappointed in a word list.

We run Farsi and Armenian in Vienna every Sunday, and this is the order in which things actually go wrong. A listener forgives a clumsy sentence. She does not forgive hearing her pastor's name turned into a common noun, and she will mention it on the way out.

Why do names break before anything else?

A name has no context to lean on. "Jehoshaphat" and "Nahum" arrive in the middle of a sentence with nothing around them to tell a system that they are people, so they come out as whatever the nearest ordinary word is. The same is true of your own surnames, your building's street, the name of your Thursday group, and the title of the song the worship leader just announced.

Verse references are the second place it slips, and in German-speaking rooms it slips reliably: English says John 3:16, German writes Joh 3,16, and a system that has not been told which convention your church reads will mix the two inside one sermon. If your preacher says "turn to the third chapter", that has to come out as the chapter your congregation sees on the screen, not a near miss.

The third is the word your church has already chosen. Most congregations that worship in more than one language have quietly settled on a rendering for grace, for repentance, for elder, for small group — often decided years ago by the person who used to interpret from the side of the platform. If nobody writes that decision down, every new volunteer and every new system re-decides it, and the congregation hears a different word each month.

Which forty words?

Count them out of your own last four Sundays, not out of a template:

• Ten names of people the congregation hears weekly: whoever preaches, whoever leads worship, the elders, the person who makes the announcements.
• Eight Bible and place names that recur in the series you are in right now. Not all of Scripture. The series.
• Six names of your own things: the ministries, the Thursday group, the youth night, the building, the annual weekend away.
• Six theological terms with the rendering your congregation has already settled on, one line per language.
• Five local words: the district, the tram stop, the hall you borrow, the neighbouring church you partner with.
• Five phrases your preacher says every week. Every preacher has them. Write them as he says them.

That is forty, and it covers most of a year, because a church's vocabulary is far smaller and far more repetitive than it feels from the inside.

Who approves an entry?

A person, by name, and always the same small group of them. A glossary that anyone can edit stops being trustworthy by the third month; a glossary that only one overloaded volunteer can edit stops being current by the second. Two people with the right to approve, and a rule that an entry carries the spelling the person themselves uses, is enough governance for a church of any size.

This is the part we were most careful about when we built Church Memory: nothing enters the list automatically. Terms are proposed from what was actually preached, and a person on the team approves or rejects each one, which is also the only honest answer to give a congregation that asks who is deciding how its words are translated.

How do we write the list without starting a project?

Open last Sunday's transcript and read the first ten minutes. Announcements are where the local vocabulary is densest: names, places, your own ministries, the song titles. Write down everything a stranger could not spell. Then read one page of the sermon for the Bible names in the current series. You will have thirty entries before you have finished a coffee, and the last ten will arrive on their own over the next month, because every time someone mentions a mistake you heard in the room, that is an entry.

Do not try to be complete. A glossary is not an attempt to describe your theology; it is a note to a competent stranger who will be joining your Sundays from now on.

What does it change after the service, not just during it?

This is the part churches underestimate. The same list of approved names and terms that keeps a live translation honest also runs through everything that comes out of the recording afterwards: the transcript, the summary, the full message, the small-group guide, and the drafts for the blog, newsletter and social posts in each language you serve. A name misspelled on Sunday morning is a name misspelled in the newsletter on Tuesday, in the study guide the small groups use in six weeks, and in the study guide or book a teaching series eventually becomes. Fixing it once, in one place, fixes all of them.

It matters in the follow-up list too. When someone leaves a prayer request or ticks "first time here" on the after-service screen, the reply that goes out carries the names your church actually uses. Getting a visitor's language right and your own pastor's name wrong in the same message is a strange first impression.

What a glossary does not do is slow anything down. The list is consulted as the service runs; a translated service still arrives under a second behind the speaker, in a natural voice that keeps the preacher's tone and rhythm. Approving forty words buys accuracy, not delay.

What to do this Sunday

Put a sheet of paper on the sound desk and ask the operator to write down every name he hears that he would not know how to spell. Do the same with the person at the welcome table for the ministry names. Compare the two lists on Monday, and you will have your first twenty entries, drawn from the service you actually ran rather than the one you imagine you run.

Then read the first ten minutes of the transcript with the list beside you. If you already produce a written record of the service, this is twenty minutes of work that improves every piece of it. And if you are still deciding what to translate and what to leave alone, build the glossary first: it makes that decision easier, whatever you end up choosing.

If you would like the glossary, the live translation and the record from one recording in your own church, ask us for a demo and we will set it up with your own last service.