Live Translated Subtitles for Events, Talks and Classes

A thirty hour course where a third of the room speaks another language. A Sunday service with new arrivals in the back rows. A conference session, a works council meeting, a training day for a team spread across four countries. The speaker is good, and half the room is quietly getting about a third of it.

Everyone reads along in their own language

The obvious fix is subtitles on a screen. The better fix is that the screen is not the only place they appear.

With lingua.direct the speaker is transcribed and translated once, and then two things happen at the same time. A screen in the room shows large subtitles for everyone to read together. And anyone who wants a different language opens a link on their own phone and reads the same talk in theirs. Over 200 languages, chosen per person, from one microphone.

This is the part most tools cannot do. Zoom, Teams and the rest carry a single subtitle track, so the meeting picks one language and everybody lives with it. That works when the room has one second language. It does not work when the room has five.

What it replaces

A simultaneous interpreter in the Netherlands typically runs around 95 euro an hour, and past the first hour the work requires two of them taking turns. For a thirty hour course that is roughly 5,700 euro, for one language. A second language doubles it.

That is the right choice for a diplomatic negotiation or a courtroom. For a workshop, a lecture series, a service or a conference track, it is usually the reason the translation simply never happens. Running the same thirty hours through lingua.direct costs a rounding error against that, and the room gets every language at once instead of one. See pricing for what a plan actually costs.

Setting it up, start to finish

1. Open a live mode on the laptop that will hear the speaker. Use the microphone for someone in the room, or device audio if the talk is coming out of a video call.
2. Open the settings and choose "Show on a second screen". You get a short web address.
3. Type that address on the screen device. A beamer laptop, a TV browser, a spare tablet on the lectern. It needs no account and nothing installed.
4. Start talking. The translation appears there as large white text on black, and keeps up as the speaker goes.

If you also want people reading on their own phones in their own languages, start a live broadcast instead. The screen in the room then becomes simply one more listener, and everyone else scans a QR code and picks a language. Up to fifty screens can watch one code at once, and the second screen itself costs nothing extra: it is showing a session you are already running.

Who this is for

Courses and training. Multi day programmes where flying in an interpreter is out of the question and a third of the group is following in a second language.

Congregations and community meetings. A regular audience with a shifting mix of first languages, week after week, on a budget that has no room for interpreting.

Conferences and trade events. Side rooms and breakout tracks that never get the interpreting budget the keynote does.

Lectures and classes. International students following a subject in a language they are still learning, who mostly need the terminology to stay on screen a moment longer.

Internal meetings. A works council, an all hands, a safety briefing where everyone is entitled to actually understand it.

Making it readable from the back of the room

Two settings decide whether this works. Text size scales with the width of the screen, so the same address suits a 1280x720 projector and a 4K panel. Sentences on screen sets how many lines stay visible at once, from one up to eight.

Fewer lines read more calmly at a distance. More lines help when people take notes or when someone looks away for a moment. Start at two, then have someone stand at the back while you adjust.

You can change both while the session is running, and the screen updates instantly. That matters more than it sounds: the beamer is usually the one device nobody can reach once the event has started.

If you are streaming as well

For a hybrid event the subtitles can go into the video instead of onto a wall. The projector view has a transparent mode built for OBS and vMix: add it as a browser source and only the text composites over your picture, with no black box behind it. It looks wrong in an ordinary browser tab, which is expected, because transparency only means something inside software that composites layers.

Already recorded? Do it the cheaper way

If the talk exists as a file, do not translate it live. Upload it and you get a subtitle file back: .srt or .vtt for a video player, or plain text to read and edit. The timings come from the recording itself, so the subtitles line up without anyone retiming them by hand.

It costs less, the quality is better because nothing has to be decided in real time, and you can fix a term before anyone sees it. Files are capped at six hours each, so a long course is several uploads. See audio file translation.

Worth knowing before the day itself

Sound quality decides everything. A microphone in front of the speaker beats a laptop microphone at the back of the room by a wide margin. If there is a mixing desk, feed it in directly. Every problem further down the line starts with audio that was hard to hear in the first place.

Test with the actual screen. Beamers wash out contrast and a TV browser can be awkward to type into. Ten minutes in the room the day before saves a scramble at the start.

Keep the screen laptop awake. The projector view asks the browser not to sleep, which Chrome and Edge honour and Firefox does not.

It is machine translation. It is very good at making a talk followable for someone who would otherwise get almost none of it. It is not the right tool where one mistranslated sentence has legal or medical consequences, and it does not replace a certified interpreter where you need one. For a lecture, a workshop, a service or a breakout session, following along imperfectly beats not following at all by a distance.

Try it before the event

Signing up includes five minutes of free translation, which is more than enough to point it at a video, put the subtitles on a second screen and see how it reads from across the room. Doing that once, a week before, is the difference between a setup that works on the day and one you are debugging while people file in.