Changelog

For visitors who listen to the translation through headphones. Until now, the audio stopped the moment a phone's screen locked, so the app kept the screen switched on for the whole sermon, and that drained the battery. With the new app update, visitors can lock their phone and put it in a pocket.

• Lock the Phone, Keep Listening: On iPhone and Android, the translation keeps playing when the screen locks or goes to sleep. The app no longer keeps the screen on while audio plays, so the battery lasts through the service.
• Pause From the Lock Screen: The lock screen shows Church Translation · your church's name with a pause button. On Android it sits in the notification. Pausing there turns the audio off in the app too.
• Locked Phones Still Count as Listening: A visitor listening with the screen locked stays in your Users Online list, and their language stays switched on. A pocketed phone no longer looks like nobody is listening.
• Audio Switches Itself Off After the Service: If no new translation has played for 30 minutes, the audio turns off by itself, in the app and in the browser. Every new sentence starts the 30 minutes again, so a long sermon or a music break never triggers it.
• Archive Days Play to the End: Listening to a past service from the archive used to stop after about two minutes. It now plays the whole day. If one sentence fails to load, playback skips to the next one instead of stopping.

To get started:

Visitors need the latest app (version 2.5.1) from the App Store or Google Play. Nothing changes in your admin settings.

One thing that stays the same: in the browser at app.churchtranslation.org, locking the screen still stops the audio. Phone browsers don't let a web page keep playing in the background, so the screen stays on while visitors listen there. If someone at your church wants to listen with the phone in their pocket, point them to the app.

If a visitor's phone was set to Chinese, Serbian or Mongolian, the app let them down. The translation itself appeared, but the menu button did nothing at all — no settings, no language picker, no archive, no announcements, and no error to explain it. Every other phone language worked normally, which made it hard to spot. This is fixed for everyone on those three languages.

• The menu opens again: Tapping the menu button now opens it, on every phone language. A visitor can reach the language picker, the archive and their settings the way everyone else always could.
• The app arrives in their language: A phone set to Chinese now opens in Chinese, and it tells the two apart — Traditional stays Traditional, Simplified stays Simplified. The same goes for Serbian and for Mongolian.
• Nothing to set up: No setting changed, and there is nothing for you to switch on. The next time an affected visitor opens your QR link, it simply works.
• The old workaround can be retired: If you have been telling visitors to set their phone to English first, open the link, then pick their language by hand, they can stop. Anyone who did that keeps the language they chose.

One thing worth knowing: the phone's language is only ever a starting point. It is read the first time a visitor opens the app, and after that the language they pick inside the app wins — so a visitor who has already chosen German keeps German no matter what their phone says. If someone was affected and picked English to get around this, they will want to switch to their own language once, in the app.

Church Translation charges per active language, and until now a language stayed on your list forever. One visitor who picked Ukrainian last spring has been adding to the bill at every service since — whether or not anyone read it. This release lets your language list follow your actual congregation.

• Languages switch off when nobody is listening: Set how long a language may go without a listener — anything from 1 minute to 24 hours — and Church Translation switches it off on its own. Nothing is deleted. The language simply stops being translated, and stops being charged.

• They come back by themselves: The moment a visitor with that language opens the app, it switches back on within seconds. No tap on the language picker, no approval from you, nothing for them to notice.

• You choose how far it reaches: Switch off only the languages visitors added themselves, or every language including the ones you added yourself.

• The language you speak is never touched: Your speech-to-text language always stays on. So does a language showing on the projector while you're translating — the projector serves exactly the people who aren't holding a phone.

• Off for your church until you switch it on: If you were already with us, nothing changes. Your languages behave exactly as they did yesterday until you turn this on yourself.

To get started:

• Go to Settings → Translation Settings

• Find "Switch off languages nobody is listening to" and click Edit

• Choose "Languages visitors added themselves" or "Every language, including the ones you added", then Save

• Under "How long to wait before switching a language off", pick your window. Churches joining today start on After 5 minutes

• Optionally, under "Catch up visitors who arrive late", decide how much of the service a latecomer gets translated. This is Off by default, because catching someone up costs translation

One thing worth knowing: the saving comes from not translating into a language nobody was listening to — so the archive for that stretch has nothing in that language to show. Rather than leaving it blank, we show the words in the language spoken at the service, with a short note explaining why. If members of your church read the archive back during the week without ever joining live, a longer window keeps more of it in their own language.