Hmong Sermon Translation

Why Hmong needs its own translation work

Hmong is tonal — seven or eight tones depending on the dialect — and its written form (Romanized Popular Alphabet, RPA) only stabilized in the 1950s. Most translation platforms either skip Hmong entirely or lump White and Green together, which is roughly like lumping Spanish and Portuguese. Acts 2 was trained separately on Hmong Dawb and Hmoob Leeg corpora, including the Vajtswv Txojlus (Hmong Bible), worship recordings from Saint Paul and Fresno congregations, and contemporary preaching from house churches in northern Laos and Thailand. Theological vocabulary like Vajtswv (God), Yexus (Jesus), and Vaj Ntsuj Plig (Holy Spirit) is handled correctly — the way Hmong believers actually use the words, with tone written accurately in RPA, where the tone marker is the final letter of the syllable.

Built for SE Asia missions in restricted contexts

Much Hmong ministry happens in environments where a foreign interpreter draws attention you do not want. Acts 2 lets a sending pastor preach from a hotel room in Chiang Mai and have it stream to a house church meeting 200 miles away in a Hmong village, with the sermon arriving in the local dialect on the participants' own phones. No interpreter at the front, no scheduled meeting with an outsider, no visible foreign presence. This is the use case multiple SE Asia mission agencies asked us to build for — and the use case Acts 2 was designed around from day one.

Built for US Hmong churches

Minnesota alone has roughly 90,000 Hmong residents, and California has another 100,000+. Hmong churches across Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Fresno, Sacramento, and Milwaukee face the same pattern as every other diaspora community: elders speak Hmong, kids speak English, parents are caught in the middle. Acts 2 lets you run one service with parallel English and Hmong streams — English dubbed in your cloned voice, Hmong as live captions. Grandparents read the sermon in Hmoob Dawb or Hmoob Leeg, teenagers hear it in English, and nobody has to leave the sanctuary.

Live captions, not a synthetic voice

Acts 2 does not ship a voice it cannot do well. Hmong has no production-grade text-to-speech we would put in front of a congregation, so we do not fake one. What you get instead is live Hmong captions on every phone in the room, generated as you preach — your own voice carries the room out loud, and the translation runs in text alongside it. RPA orthography actually helps here: because tone is written as the final consonant of each syllable, a Hmong caption carries tonal precision that a mediocre synthetic voice would destroy. When Hmong voice synthesis reaches a standard we would stake a pulpit on, we will ship it and say so plainly.

Cost compared to human interpretation

Qualified Hmong church interpreters are genuinely scarce. In the US, the going rate is $80 to $200 per hour when you can find one. In SE Asia, mission interpreter costs vary wildly but reach $300 to $800 per week with transportation. Acts 2 runs at roughly $0.005 per minute. A Sunday service translates for $0.30. A full week of preaching in a Hmong village house-church circuit translates for less than $5. Hmong church AI translation finally has a price that matches the size of the communities being served.

Frequently asked questions