Stewardship: Making the Most of Your Resources
You are charged for every language you keep active. This guide shows how to let your language list follow your actual congregation, and what each setting costs or saves.
Written By Dennis Dueck
Last updated 20 days ago
Why your language list costs money
Church Translation charges for translation per language. Every language on your active list is translated on every utterance of every service — whether one person is reading it or nobody is.
With Automatically approve languages switched on, that list only ever grows. A visitor who selects Ukrainian once adds it permanently. Next Sunday, and every Sunday after, that language is translated again even if that visitor never returns.
This is the single largest avoidable cost in most churches' bills.
Switch off languages nobody is listening to
Rather than auditing the list by hand, you can let Church Translation do it. A language that has gone without a listener for a period you choose is switched off automatically, and switches itself back on the moment a visitor with that language opens the app.
Nothing is deleted. A switched-off language stays on your list, greyed out with the time it was last used, so you always see the truth.
If your church was already using Church Translation before 22 August 2026, this is switched off. Nothing has changed for you until you turn it on.
Turning it on
Go to Settings → Translation Settings
Find Switch off languages nobody is listening to and click Edit
Choose how far it should reach, then click Save
Two languages are never switched off, whatever you choose: the language you speak (your speech-to-text language), and a language showing on the projector while you are translating — the projector serves exactly the people who are not holding a phone.
Choosing your wait time
Under How long to wait before switching a language off, pick the window: 1, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 24 hours. Churches joining today start on After 5 minutes.
The timing is approximate. A language switches off somewhere between your chosen window and roughly a minute and a half later.
Most of the saving is week-to-week, not within a service. A church carrying eight languages accumulated over past months, with two real listeners today, saves roughly 80% simply by having last week's languages switched off before this week's service starts. Any window will do that. Trimming a language that lost its listener mid-service adds only a few percent more, and costs you archive gaps to get.
So: pick a short window only if you actively want the mid-service saving and accept the trade below. Otherwise a long one gets you nearly all the benefit with none of the cost.
Catching up visitors who arrive late
A visitor who arrives ten minutes into the service reactivates their language within seconds — but those first ten minutes were never translated into it.
Under Catch up visitors who arrive late you can choose to translate the part they missed: the last 15 minutes, the last hour, or the whole service. This is Off by default, and deliberately so — catching someone up is real translation and it costs real money. It also refills the gap for a visitor who simply left and came back, handing back the saving you just made.
If you want the maximum saving, the pairing is the shortest wait time with catch-up Off.
What this means for your archive
This is the honest trade, and it is worth understanding before you choose a short window.
The saving comes from not translating into a language nobody was listening to. So for that stretch of the service, there is no text in that language to put in the archive.
Rather than showing a blank, Church Translation shows the words in the language spoken at the service, with a short note explaining why. Readers always get something.
If members of your church typically read the archive back during the week without ever joining the live service, their language will be switched off during services and they will see the spoken language instead of their own. If that describes part of your congregation, choose a longer wait time — or leave automatic switching off entirely for them by using Languages visitors added themselves and adding their language yourself, which exempts it.
Removing a language for good
Switching off is not the same as removing. To remove a language permanently, deselect it in Settings → Translation Settings. That deletes it, and a visitor who selects it again will appear as a pending request for you to approve rather than being added silently.
Languages that have been switched off and untouched for 60 days are removed automatically.