Privacy Policy
Effective date: 30 October 2026
TranslateSermons translates church services live into captions and a spoken voice. This policy explains what the service and its app handle, for the three kinds of people who use it: listeners, church team members, and the churches whose services are translated. Questions go to hello@translatesermons.com.
Listeners
- Joining a service needs no account. We do not ask for your name, email address or contacts.
- The language you choose and your display preferences are stored only on your device.
- If you suggest a better translation, the text of your suggestion goes to the church that ran the service so its team can review it. Suggestions are not linked to your identity.
- Spoken translations are generated on our server from the translated text by a voice provider (Microsoft Azure AI Speech or ElevenLabs) and streamed to you, or spoken by your phone's own built-in voice. Your microphone is never used while listening.
- The camera is used only to scan a QR code. Images are not stored or sent anywhere.
- Our server keeps ordinary connection logs (IP address, time, page) for a short period to run the service and prevent abuse.
Church team members
- People who run a church's services sign in with their email address and a one-time code; there are no passwords. We store the email address to identify the account and to send codes, team invitations and the summary email after each service (through our email provider, Microsoft Azure Communication Services or Resend).
- An account records which church teams the person belongs to and their role. Admins of a church can see the email addresses of its team members.
- Payments for church plans are handled by Stripe. We store only Stripe's customer and subscription identifiers, never card details.
- You can delete your account in the app (Settings, Delete my account). If you were the only member of a church, the church and its data are deleted with it.
Churches and speakers
- Service audio comes from the church's own stream or sound desk. While a service is live, our server receives that audio and sends it to our speech-recognition provider (Deepgram) to be turned into text. Live audio is processed in real time and is not recorded by us. A recording that a church admin uploads to test the service is kept on our server (the church's newest five) until the admin deletes it or the church is deleted.
- The resulting text is translated by our AI provider (Anthropic) and delivered to listeners. Transcripts and translations are stored so listeners can catch up during the service and the church can review them afterwards. Anyone with a service's code or link can open its transcript.
- Churches can store a glossary, sermon notes, Bible-version preferences and example translations. These are used only to translate that church's services.
- Our providers (Deepgram for speech recognition, Anthropic for translation, Azure AI Speech and ElevenLabs for voice) process content on our behalf under their business terms, which do not permit using it to train their models.
Retention and deletion
- Transcripts, translations, uploaded test recordings and listener suggestions are kept until the church deletes them: deleting a church in the app removes its services, transcripts, suggestions, team and training material at once.
- Team members can delete their own account in the app at any time.
- We keep monthly usage totals (live hours and character counts) per church for billing, and the records Stripe needs for payments.
Children
The service is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect their personal information.
Changes
When this policy changes, the effective date above changes with it. Material changes are announced to church admins by email.