Wondering what others might be doing for service translation via app or webpage so that I’m hopefully not reinventing the wheel.
Our Spanish ministry currently has a live service translation via checked out radios and headphones, and volunteer translators watching a live feed and broadcasting over a small transmitter.
We’re having a large event in a few months where they are expecting a lot of Spanish-speaking people to be in attendance, way more than we have radios for, and I have been asked to find a way to ‘digitize’ the whole process so that the attendees can listen on their own phones.
Any ideas? I think the route I’m looking at going right now is to set up an Icecast server since it’s A) Free and B) looks simple to run. I’m most concerned about latency. The closer to real time the better.
We use Wavecast (WaveCAST - Williams AV) and have had pretty good success. It takes audio in and a network connection to our guest network. Then people just use the Wavecast app and select English (for assisted listening) or Spanish. On the IP side it uses multicast and that seems to work well on the traffic side.
Basically then people need their own phones + headphones, and with the lack of headphone jacks, it does make it difficult for us to supply headphones for people.
Our pastor who does our live Korean translation started using Discord for the translations! I think we didn’t have enough radios and headphones and apparently many Koreans use Discord. Not knowing a whole lot about such things, I thought it was a brilliant solution.
Thanks @jonny and @elohroff, those are both good ideas. Looks like Wavecast is backordered, though, so I’m probably going to need to come up with something else.
I was also thinking about the lack of headphones being an issue… I wonder if there’s a way to transcribe it live and have the text on a webpage.
Totally forgot about this thread, but we ended up going with another product called AudioFetch.
We were kind of date-driven with purchasing, which is why I think we went with them over Listen Everywhere (they were backlogged at the time), but overall it’s worked pretty well. Kind of old school looking interface and app, but it does what it says on the tin.
Yes, you could connect just a mic to it. Each “channel” can use either analog 3.5mm, optical, or digital coax input. We have a couple of outputs from our sound console that go to our Audio Fetch. One is basically just the house mix for “assisted listening”, and the other channel is from our Spanish translators that are in another room. They usually have two translators, a male and female translator, so those two are mixed together into one output to the AudioFetch.