The projected Bible now speaks fifteen languages
A congregation is not always of one language. In Belgium, the same room brings together French and Dutch speakers. In Paris, London or Brussels, diaspora churches read in Lingala on Sunday morning and in French in the afternoon. And in many assemblies, the parents do not read the same language as the children.
Until now Sanctumel projected the Bible in five languages. It now projects fifteen.
The ten new ones
Africa. Lingala, Swahili, Hausa and Yoruba. These four came first because they cover both churches on the continent and the largest diasporas in Europe.
Europe. German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Ukrainian. Polish, Romanian and Ukrainian carry three of the largest evangelical communities in Western Europe.
They join French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch, already present.
What bilingual mode changes
Bilingual mode does more than switch language: it shows the same verse in two languages, on the same screen, side by side or one above the other. The congregation reads the passage in the language it knows, and nobody is left out.
The setting lives in the customisation panel of the control room. There you choose the second language, the layout, and the alignment of the projected text.
A check you will never see
Two translations do not always number verses the same way. The same number can point to two different texts, and two verses that do not match displayed opposite each other would be worse than a single language.
So Sanctumel compares the numbering of both versions before displaying anything. When they diverge, the screen falls back to one language and the control room tells you why. This affects fewer than one chapter in ten, and it is the price of a pairing you can trust.
What is still missing, and why
Kikongo, Tshiluba, Kitetela, Kinyarwanda and Kirundi are not there. Not by oversight: there is currently no complete, freely redistributable translation in those languages. The texts exist, but their rights belong to the Bible Societies, and we do not publish a text whose rights we do not hold.
We are approaching the Digital Bible Library for those permissions. A single request would cover all five.
The texts and their licences
Every added translation is either in the public domain or published under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licence. They come from eBible.org, and the version name is projected with the verse: a congregation has the right to know what is being read to it.