The Cheapest Ways to Translate a Church Service (Ranked, With Trade-offs)

Every church translation article eventually gets to the pricing table and stops being useful, because the pricing table starts at "contact us for a quote." This one starts at £0 and works up, honestly, including where the free option quietly costs more than it looks like.

Prices checked August 2026. Full disclosure: I built Voco, one of the paid tools ranked here, and it's not at the top of every category on purpose.

Free options and their real costs

A bilingual volunteer, unpaid. The obvious first answer, and often the right one for a single language with a willing, capable person. The real cost isn't money, it's the volunteer's time, the cognitive load of live interpreting (genuinely exhausting after 20-30 minutes), and the fact that this person never gets to just sit in the service. It also caps out fast: one volunteer means one language and one point of failure.

Google Translate or a phone translation app, held up by a listener. Free, and genuinely useful in a pinch for casual conversation before or after a service. For sustained live interpretation of a sermon, it struggles badly with theological vocabulary (documented cases show it translating "the flesh" literally rather than in its biblical sense), background noise, and any kind of extended, unscripted speech. It also requires the listener to hold a phone up the whole time, actively listening through a bad interface, which is tiring and conspicuous. Fine as an emergency fallback. Not a real weekly solution.

Printed handouts translated in advance. Genuinely free if someone already knows the language and has time before Sunday. Works well for structured content (order of service, announcements, a sermon outline) and badly for anything spontaneous: prayer requests, unplanned remarks, the second half of a sermon that goes somewhere the notes didn't anticipate.

The honest verdict on free: it works for one language, for a while, until the volunteer burns out or the mismatch between "what was said" and "what was printed" becomes a real barrier. Free isn't nothing. It's also not free of cost, just free of invoice.

Under £10/week options

This is where flat-fee AI subscription software lives. Voco's Starter plan is £6/week plus VAT: choose 1-2 language groups per service from 200+ supported attendee languages, with no app (attendees scan a QR code and it opens in their phone's browser). Annualised, that's £312/year, and there's a 7-day free trial with no card required, so you can test it before committing to anything. OBS, ProPresenter and vMix display integrations are included from the Church plan.

At this price point you're trading the warmth and precision of a human voice for breadth: instead of one language covered well by a volunteer, you get every language your visitors might actually speak, covered adequately, all the time, without needing to recruit anyone.

Under £20/week options

Voco's Church plan, £12/week plus VAT (£624/year), adds the fuller feature set: boosted theological vocabulary, deeper integration options for churches running a livestream production.

Event-platform tools priced by usage (Wordly, Interactio, Glossa, OneAccord) can land in this range too if your usage is genuinely light, but their pricing models are built around hours-per-month, not a flat weekly fee, so a busier week or an extra language pushes the cost up unpredictably. Glossa's entry tier is $99/month (roughly £16/week) for 25 translation hours; OneAccord is $150/month for 5 hours across 5 languages. Read the small print on hours before assuming these stay under £20 for your actual usage pattern.

FM hardware, amortised. A basic $66-$180 Retekess kit, bought once and used for three years, works out to roughly 50p-£1.30 per week in hardware terms alone, genuinely the cheapest per-week number on this list. But it needs a human interpreter speaking into the transmitter to be worth anything, so the real weekly cost is the interpreter's cost, not the hardware's.

The ranking table

• Free options genuinely work, for one language, until the person doing it burns out.
• Flat-fee AI subscriptions are the only tier on this list priced predictably regardless of how many languages or Sundays you use them for.
• Usage-based event platforms can look cheap on a light month and expensive on a busy one. Check the hours math against your actual attendance pattern.
• Hardware alone doesn't translate anything; it's a delivery method for a human voice, and its "cheap" price tag doesn't include that voice.

What I'd do with a £0 / £10 / £50 monthly budget

£0 a month: Start with a bilingual volunteer for your single biggest language, and printed handouts for the structured parts of the service (order of service, announcements). Accept that spontaneous moments won't be covered, and be upfront with visitors about that limitation rather than pretending it isn't there.

£10 a month, roughly £2.30/week: This doesn't quite cover a flat-fee subscription at current prices, so it's really a "save up to £6/week" budget. Put the volunteer-plus-handouts approach in place now, and set a date to move to a proper subscription once the budget allows it.

£50 a month, roughly £11.50/week: This comfortably covers Voco's Starter plan (£6/week, £24/month) with room to spare, or gets close to the Church plan. At this budget, give it a month before you decide. The first week is free on the trial, then you are working from real usage data rather than a guess. See the cheapest options compared.

I priced this so a church with almost nothing could still do it. If one family has started coming and they need Farsi, that should not require a business case. It should be a number small enough that you just get on with it.

And if you are running a couple of services on a Sunday, or a midweek as well, with more languages in the mix, the same thing scales up without turning into a metered bill you cannot predict.

The honest ranking isn't "free is bad, paid is good." It's that free options solve one language for a while, and a flat-fee subscription solves every language, indefinitely, for less than the cost of a round of coffees after the service. See current pricing and start the free trial here, and if the no-app, QR-code approach is new to you, this explains exactly how it works.

Frequently asked questions

What should churches know about free options and their real costs?

A bilingual volunteer, unpaid. The obvious first answer, and often the right one for a single language with a willing, capable person. The real cost isn't money, it's the volunteer's time, the cognitive load of live interpreting (genuinely exhausting after 20-30 minutes), and the fact that this person never gets to just sit in the service. It also caps out fast: one volunteer means one language and one point of failure.

What should churches know about under £10/week options?

This is where flat-fee AI subscription software lives. Voco's Starter plan is £6/week plus VAT: choose 1-2 language groups per service from 200+ supported attendee languages, with no app (attendees scan a QR code and it opens in their phone's browser). Annualised, that's £312/year, and there's a 7-day free trial with no card required, so you can test it before committing to anything. OBS, ProPresenter and vMix display integrations are included from the Church plan.

What should churches know about under £20/week options?

Voco's Church plan, £12/week plus VAT (£624/year), adds the fuller feature set: boosted theological vocabulary, deeper integration options for churches running a livestream production.

What should churches know about the ranking table?

- Free options genuinely work, for one language, until the person doing it burns out. - Flat-fee AI subscriptions are the only tier on this list priced predictably regardless of how many languages or Sundays you use them for. - Usage-based event platforms can look cheap on a light month and expensive on a busy one. Check the hours math against your actual attendance pattern. - Hardware alone doesn't translate anything; it's a delivery method for a human voice, and its "cheap" price tag doesn't i

First published on Medium.