If many of your residents read Spanish better than English, Spanish translation for city council meetings is a natural place to start. This guide covers how live Spanish captions work, how to handle Spanish speakers at public comment, and a short setup checklist so residents can follow the meeting from the first item to adjournment.
Start with your data
Before you commit, check American Community Survey data on residents who speak English less than "very well." If your council is an SB 707 eligible legislative body, that same data determines your "applicable languages" for agenda translation, up to three, starting July 1, 2026. If Spanish is one of them, your Spanish agenda must be posted with the English agenda and include instructions in Spanish for joining by phone or internet. Confirm with your city attorney whether your council is covered.
SB 707 does not itself require live captions. Live Spanish captions are a practical way to support the bill's language-access and participation goals, and to make the translated agenda useful once the meeting starts. See the SB 707 agenda translation checklist.
How live Spanish captions work
SentraCaptions connects to the encoder you already stream with, such as Pearl, OBS or vMix, as one more RTMP or SRT destination. No new hardware. From that audio:
- English captions appear about one second after speech, with the sentence in progress updating live.
- Spanish captions are translated live, alongside the English. You can choose Spanish or Mexican Spanish.
- You can add other languages at the same meeting, up to 8 in total.
Remember that these are text captions. SentraCaptions does not provide spoken interpretation or audio in Spanish.
Where residents see Spanish captions
In the chamber
The chamber screen is a full-screen caption display for the TV in the chamber or lobby. It can show English and Spanish side by side, with the meeting title, a clock and a QR code. Because it is always on, it works as open captions for everyone in the room. See the chamber screen setup guide.
On residents' phones
Residents scan the QR code and read along in Spanish at their own text size. No app, no sign-in. This also helps residents watching from home, if you post the link with the stream. See captions on residents' phones.
On YouTube Live
YouTube shows one caption language per stream. You can send captions in one language to your YouTube Live stream. You might keep English there and point Spanish speakers to the phone page, but if Spanish is the language your viewers need most, you can choose it. See YouTube Live captions for meetings.
Spanish speakers at public comment
Speech recognition in SentraCaptions is English, with Spanish speakers at public comment recognized too. When a resident comments in Spanish, their comment is recognized and captioned rather than lost from the caption stream.
A few practical tips:
- Ask speakers to stay close to the microphone and speak at a normal pace.
- Announce in Spanish, at the start of public comment, that residents may speak in Spanish.
- Under SB 707, eligible bodies must reasonably assist residents who want interpretation, as long as it doesn't disrupt the meeting. Decide in advance how you will respond if someone asks for a human interpreter.
For more, see public comment in more than one language.
Getting Spanish captions right
Translation quality varies by language. Ask a fluent Spanish speaker on staff or in the community to read the Spanish captions during a meeting or two and tell you what reads awkwardly.
Local names deserve special attention. Add council members, streets, neighborhoods and program names to your caption glossary so captions spell them right. See building a caption glossary. Good audio helps both languages; see chamber audio tips.
Every screen labels the captions as automatic and notes they may contain errors, in plain view of residents.
Setup checklist
- Confirm your languages from American Community Survey data, and your SB 707 status with counsel.
- Add SentraCaptions as a destination on your encoder.
- Select English plus Spanish (or Mexican Spanish) for the meeting.
- Load your glossary of local names.
- Put the chamber screen on the TV and test that the QR code opens the phone page.
- Add a Spanish line to the agenda explaining how to follow along on a phone.
- Use pause for recess and closed session; while paused, nothing is captioned, translated, stored or billed, and the screens show "Paused".
- After the meeting, download the Spanish transcript as TXT or an SRT subtitle file for the posted video. Transcripts are not official minutes.