Interpreting equipment for a church: buy, borrow or skip

Buy the sound feed, borrow the receivers if you still need them, and skip the booth. A church translating its service today needs one clean line out of the mixing desk and a way for each listener to hear — and the second half of that, for most churches, is the phone already in the listener's pocket.

That is the short answer. The longer one is worth ten minutes, because interpreting equipment is the part of a translated service where churches spend the most money on the thing that matters least.

What interpreting equipment actually means

Ask three suppliers and you get three different lists. Strip it back and there are only four parts:

1. A microphone the system can hear. Usually the preacher's existing lapel or handheld mic.
2. A way to get that audio out of the desk — one aux or matrix output, or a USB interface.
3. Somewhere the translation happens, which is either a human interpreter in a quiet spot or software.
4. A way for the listener to hear it: a receiver and headphones, or their own phone.

Parts one and two you already own. Part four is where the old shopping list lived: thirty FM or infrared receivers, thirty sets of headphones, a charging case, a transmitter, an antenna. Part three used to need a booth.

Do we still need receivers and headsets?

If your church already owns a working receiver system, keep it. It is paid for, it needs no WiFi, and the people who use it every week know how it feels. Nothing below argues for throwing out equipment that works, and we set the three routes — headsets, a human interpreter, and what AI changes — side by side in headsets, interpreters and what AI changes.

If you are starting from nothing, the honest arithmetic goes the other way. Thirty receivers plus headphones is a real purchase, plus the volunteer who hands them out and counts them back in, plus the batteries, plus the two that go missing every quarter. Against that: a QR code on the screen, the listener's own phone, and nothing to install.

We run four languages in Vienna every Sunday, including Farsi and Armenian, and the only hardware in that chain is a cable from the desk.

What to buy, concretely

• One aux or matrix output from the desk, and one cheap USB audio interface. This is the whole hardware budget for most churches. Do not pick up the room with a phone on the pulpit; take the line the desk already mixes. Which output, and why it matters more than anything else you buy, is in the audio feed: aux or clip-on.
• A bag of plain wired earphones. Twenty of them, the cheapest kind. The visitor who needs the translation most is the one who did not bring any. More on that in earphones for a translated service.
• A printed QR card, and the same code on the screen. Print it big enough to read from the back row. We learned that one the hard way.
• Nothing else, in the first month. Run four Sundays before you buy a single receiver. You will know by then whether anyone wanted one.

What to borrow

If a second language turns up for one Sunday — a visiting speaker, a guest family, a funeral — borrow rather than buy. Many city churches own a receiver case that sits idle most weeks, and most will lend it for a Sunday if you ask. The same is true of a spare lapel mic.

The thing not to borrow is an interpreter's time without asking properly. A volunteer interpreting a forty-minute sermon is doing hard work, not a favour, and three Sundays in a row is how a church loses one.

What you can skip

• The booth. A quiet corner with a music stand does the same job for a human interpreter.
• A second room. Sending the non-German speakers next door to watch a stream solves the language and creates a separate congregation.
• A dedicated phone or tablet per listener. It is the one thing people reliably bring themselves.
• An app. If a system needs a download to listen, the visitor with two percent battery and no WiFi password will not hear the sermon.

What it costs to run, not to buy

Equipment is a one-off; the service is monthly. Churches comparing the two usually find the hardware is the smaller number, and the sum that matters is per Sunday rather than per device — we work that through in what a translated service costs per Sunday and in what church translation costs.

What to do this Sunday

Before you order anything: stand at the desk during the service and find out whether you have a spare output. Then ask two people after the service which language they would have listened in. That is your equipment list, and it is shorter than the catalogue.

And the week you do switch something on, say it once from the front. Equipment that nobody is told about gets used by nobody.

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Further reading: AI church translation, and how to test it and which AI tools a church actually uses.