You never maintain two websites. English is the one you write; every other language your parish offers is generated from it, marked as machine-made, and left for a person to check when they have a minute.
Every piece of parish content visitors read is stored with a version per language. You type the English; when you save, Nave sends it to a translation engine and fills in each language the parish has turned on. Nothing waits on you: the Spanish is on the public site within about a minute of the save.
A visitor whose language has no translation yet simply sees the English — a page is never blank because a translation is still on its way.
Anything a parishioner reads that the office wrote in English: announcements and events; a ministry's name, description and meeting schedule; resources, appointment types, special days and Mass-time notes; the bulletin's Sunday title, sections and sponsor blurbs; the sacrament catalog and emergency alerts; parish info (name, patron, tagline, "About", the pastor's bio, the appeal); giving fund names; and the pastor's broadcasts.
Content parishioners submit — classifieds, prayer intentions, Job Board posts, Matrimonials profiles — is handled differently: Nave detects which language it was written in rather than assuming English, then translates it into the others.
Languages are switched on per parish, on the Features page. Turning one on is the moment the translator starts working for you.
Who: anyone with Write on Settings (the Features page).
A Tagalog pack is listed too, but Tagalog is currently paused across Nave — built, yet hidden from every switcher until Nave resumes it — so switching it on today changes nothing visible.
If a language is not on your parish's plan, the row says so rather than offering a switch; Nave grants it from the platform side. Switching Spanish off removes it from the live site, not just the switcher — a visitor whose browser remembers Spanish sees English — but the stored Spanish, corrections included, is kept, so switching back on restores it.
Automatic translation runs when content is saved. A parish that switches on Spanish after a year of writing announcements has a year of rows that have never been through the translator. Below the language list is the button for that: Translate existing content now.
It queues every existing announcement, event, ministry, resource, special day, Mass time, bulletin, sacrament setting and your parish profile for translation. The translator skips whatever is already current and never touches hand-edited text, so pressing it twice — or after you have started correcting — costs nothing.
Two places. The Translations page shows the health of the whole site and points you at what needs a look; the correction itself happens on the normal editing form, right under the English.
Who: anyone with Translations in People & Team → Access — its own row, separate from Content, because checking the Spanish is often a different person's job from writing the English.
The page opens with a card per enabled language, badged Up to date or "N need attention", with four counts:
Below the cards, Needs attention lists every missing or out-of-date field — the item's name, its section, and the field (Title, Body, Description…) — with a language chip and a Missing or Out of date badge, missing first. Each line links to that section of the back office (Announcements, Events, Ministries…), where you open the item. The list shows the first 100; a long list is what the Regenerate button is for.
The review covers announcements, events, ministries, resources, the bulletin, appointment types, special days, the sacrament catalog, emergency alerts and parish info. The review itself is read-only; the one control that changes anything is the Regenerate button, and even that only asks the machine to fill in what is missing or out of date.
Open any translatable item — say an announcement. Each field is a single English box, with a small line beneath it showing a dot per enabled language and one of four words:
Press Customize to open the per-language boxes (they open by themselves when a translation is Edited or Out of date). Each box shows the English above it — "EN: …" — so you can check the translation against what it should say.
A one-line banner at the top of the form sums the item up: "Spanish will be generated when you save", "3 fields out of date", or "Translations up to date · 1 edited by hand". When something is missing or out of date it offers Regenerate now, which re-runs the translator for that item without your changing anything.
Who: anyone who can edit the item.
Two other controls sit beside the badge. Reset to auto (on an Edited field) empties the box, so the next save regenerates a fresh machine translation and the pin is gone. Regenerate (on an Out of date field) does the same for a machine translation the English has outgrown. Leaving a Spanish box empty always means "let the machine fill it".
It stays exactly as you wrote it. A hand-edited translation is never marked out of date and never regenerated, however much the English moves on — that is what makes correcting worthwhile. The flip side: if you rewrite the English of a field someone corrected by hand, re-read the Spanish yourself. Nave will not flag it, because as far as it knows a person has already decided what the Spanish should say. When the old correction no longer fits, press Reset to auto and save, then correct the fresh draft.
A machine translation, by contrast, is tied to the exact English it came from: change one word and it is marked Out of date and redone on save.
A general translation engine does not know it is working for a parish. The word that proved it was "Mass": every pilot parish's "Mass Coordinators" came back as "Coordinadores de masas" — masa being dough. Editing the row did not fix it for long; the next English edit re-translated and re-broke it.
So Nave applies a short glossary of Catholic vocabulary to the machine's output before saving it: Mass becomes Misa, a sacristan sacristán rather than the non-word "sacrista", a greeter a ministro de hospitalidad rather than a receptionist. A correction fires only when the English contains the term, so a bake sale's real masa is left alone. Clock times get the same treatment: Nave restores the 12-hour AM/PM form the site uses everywhere where the engine had switched to a 24-hour clock.
If a liturgical term keeps coming back wrong, correct it by hand and tell Nave — a glossary entry fixes it for every parish, every time.
The reader chooses; the parish decides what is on offer.
When a parish offers more than one language, a small globe with the current language code sits in the site header. It opens a menu of the languages the parish has turned on, each in its own name — English, Español. Choosing one reloads the page in that language and remembers the choice for a year. A parish that offers only English shows no globe; the same switcher sits in the back-office header, so staff can work in Spanish too.
English pages have plain addresses; Spanish adds a short prefix — /calendar and /es/calendar (on a Nave-hosted address the prefix comes after your parish's name). So a Spanish page can be shared and bookmarked as Spanish: paste /es/… into the bulletin or a text and the recipient lands in Spanish whatever their own setting. And search engines see the Spanish site as its own set of pages rather than one English page that changes when a cookie says so. Menus, buttons and form labels follow the same choice.
On a ministry or event form, "Language this group meets in" / "Language this event is held in" records a fact about the gathering, offered as English plus the languages the parish has turned on. It shows as a badge, and on the public Ministries page it is the outer grouping — Spanish-language groups are listed as their own community, not as translations of the English ones — with a separate "Filter by language" control, because a Spanish reader may well be looking for the English young-adults group. A group that meets in a language the parish has since switched off keeps its setting.
When Nave emails a parishioner — a serving reminder, a ministry note — it uses the person's preferred language from their profile; failing that, the language of the ministry the message is about; and English only after that. A Spanish-language Lectors group is reachable in Spanish before any of its members has touched a setting.
Give it a minute — translation happens after the save, not during it. If the field still shows "Will auto-translate" after a few minutes, open the item and press Regenerate now in the banner. If nothing changes, check Settings → Features → Languages: the translator only works in languages that are switched on.
On the Translations page, "Regenerate missing & out-of-date" appears only for people who can also change the Features page, because it queues work for the whole parish. Reviewing the list needs only the Translations row in Access; for everyone else the page header links to Features instead, so you know where to ask.
Not for office-authored content: English is what the translator reads from, and a field with no English has nothing to translate. Write the English, save, then correct the Spanish under Customize if you want your own wording. Only parishioner-submitted content — classifieds, prayer intentions, job posts — may start in another language.
Translation runs on save, so anything written before the switch has never been through it. Press Translate existing content now under Languages on the Features page (or Regenerate missing & out-of-date on the Translations page) once; it catches up everything that exists and skips anything already current.