Digital Invitation Machine Translation: Check Before Sending

You write your digital invitation in Spanish, switch on the English version for the guests flying in from London, and publish. Three days later someone calls to ask who Tuesday is. Machine translation had turned Martí into Tuesday and nobody caught it, because you only ever read your own language. You can set up a digital invitation in two languages today from the collection and send the link the same afternoon. What you cannot skip is the read-through.

A bilingual invitation is not a favour you do for international guests. It is the same link, opened in two languages, and every field goes through the same editor: names, date, time, place, dress code. Here is the order in which things usually break.

Machine translation breaks proper nouns first

Google Translate is good at sentences and hopeless at names. It does not know that Martí is a person, so it guesses. The venue gets the same treatment: a finca turns into a farm, and a street becomes a description of a street. Family nicknames are worse, because they have no equivalent anywhere. The machine either leaves them untouched or invents something nobody in your family would recognise.

• Names, nicknames and the venue: never translate them. Martí stays Martí, la iaia stays la iaia.
• Times and dates: pick one format and keep it in both languages. If Spanish says 19:30, English says 19:30.
• Dress code: use words that read the same in both languages, like formal or black tie.
• Address and map link: translate only the part that has an official English version, and leave the map link alone.

Check your digital invitation scene by scene

An invitation is not one screen. It is scenes that follow each other, and each scene carries its own texts: a label, the names, the date, a line, the place. Review both languages in every scene, not just on the cover, because the cover is the only part you have already read ten times.

The character counter earns its place here. Save the date fits where Reserva la fecha does not, and a longer translation can push a heading out of its frame. If a field stays empty in one language, your guest sees a gap in the middle of the scene. Not a subtle one.

Machine translation does not make mistakes you can hear. It makes mistakes you only notice when a guest asks who Tuesday is.

Dates, times and addresses: where machine translation slips most

Numbers travel badly. 19:30 needs no translation, but 7:30 pm confuses half of Europe. A dress code written as traje oscuro comes out as dark suit, which means something narrower than you think, while formal survives translation almost anywhere. In the address, translate only what has a real translation: Carrer de la Pau stays Carrer de la Pau so the taxi driver gets there.

The guest test, before you publish

Send the link to one person who speaks the other language and ask them to say the time and the place out loud. If they hesitate, rewrite that line. Then read only the English version from top to bottom: if at any point you cannot tell whether you are reading the ceremony or the toast, that text needs another pass. Copy the translated lines into a note on your phone and compare them one by one with the original. Word order changes, and sometimes the meaning changes with it.

None of this needs a designer or a second version of the invitation. Both languages live inside the same digital invitation, on one link, for 29.99 EUR as a single payment. If you spot a typo the day after sending, you edit it and the link stays exactly the same: no reprints, no second envelope, no message in the group chat explaining the correction. Go through the scenes, fix the Tuesday, and send it. Your celebration starts here.