Integrating the Ukrainian refugees into the Swiss community

Joel Bettler of Christliches Lebenszentrum Spiez approached us not long after the Ukrainian conflict began, seeking translation services for the displaced Ukrainian community in Switzerland.

Of course, we were more than happy to help.

Stenomatic has since then played a crucial role in making the church's regular services accessible to all, regardless of language barriers. The Christliches Lebenszentrum Spiez church has since added three more languages to its services, catering to an even more diverse audience.

Here’s how they utilized our AI-powered translation solution to achieve this.

The Mission

Christliches Lebenszentrum Spiez is a church located in the mountain area of Switzerland with a congregation of around 700 people. For many years, the motto of the church has been "joy in life".

‘We are excited about life and we cultivate a positive outlook on life. This joy comes from our relationship with God and our goal is to help people develop a personal relationship with God as well as help them thrive in their lives’ says the pastor, Joel Bettler.

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Activities

Christliches Lebenszentrum Spiez holds weekly Sunday morning services at 9 and 11 am. At 11am, the service is being live-streamed online and is watched by around 1000 people every week.

When did you start to look for a translation solution?‍

For many years we've offered live translation into German and English when needed. (We have to translate into the German language since our dialect is not understood by most German visitors and foreigners who are learning German, therefore the translation is needed).
With the war in Ukraine, many refugees came to Switzerland and we wanted them to be able to listen to the sermon in their own language. And many of them do not speak German or English. Therefore we connected with Stenomatic and they helped us deploy a real-time Ukrainian translation for the community.
Although we do not have Ukrainian visitors every week, we use the tool regularly, and the Ukrainian people are very thankful to understand the service and that we care about them.
Without the translation tool from Stenomatic, we would not be able to offer translation, as it is tough to find human translators who can translate from Swiss German into Ukrainian live.

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How often are you using Stenomatic?‍

We use Stenomatic for our Sunday Morning service at 11am - we translate everything that is spoken on stage.

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How does your setup look like?‍

Our service is in Swiss German. One of our three Sunday services is translated. We have guests who need German, English, Turkish and Ukrainian translation. Sometimes people also need French, Spanish or Persian.
We have two human live translators who translate into (High) German and English. They do that with a wireless radio translation system, where people listen to the sermon with a receiver and headphones. We use English translation to feed into the Stenomatic platform - with that, people who need Turkish, Ukrainian, French, Persian or Spanish can listen to the sermon with their cell phones using Stenomatic web application.

'We are very thankful that Stenomatic is helping us in translating our Services into Ukrainian.'
Joel Bettler, Pastor