Your partner's mum turns seventy and she speaks about four words of English. Your Erasmus friend from a decade ago just got engaged. The colleague who covered for you all summer is Brazilian and you would quite like to thank her properly.
So you open a translation app, paste in "Wishing you all the very best on your special day", and out comes something that is technically correct and reads like a letter from a bank.
Here is how to do it better. None of this needs you to speak the language.
Short sentences survive. Long ones do not
The single biggest improvement you can make is to cut your sentence length in half before you translate anything.
"I hope you have the most wonderful day surrounded by all the people who love you most" has three subordinate clauses, a superlative and an idiom. Machine translation will produce something grammatical and strange.
"Happy birthday. We are thinking of you today. We love you." will come out clean in almost any language, because there is nothing in it to get wrong.
This feels like you are saying less. You are not. You are saying the same thing without the packaging, and packaging is exactly what translates badly.
Get the formality right, because the language will force you to choose
English lets you dodge this. Most other languages do not.
French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Greek all have separate familiar and formal words for "you", and a translation app will pick one without telling you. Get it wrong and you either sound cold to a close friend or overfamiliar with your partner's grandmother.
The rough rule for cards:
- Family, close friends, children: familiar. French tu, German du, Spanish tú, Italian tu, Dutch je, Greek εσύ.
- Someone's parents you have met twice, a colleague, anyone much older you are not close to: formal. French vous, German Sie, Spanish usted, Italian Lei, Dutch u, Greek εσείς.
If you are genuinely unsure, formal is the safer error. Being slightly too polite reads as respectful. Being too casual with someone's grandmother reads as rude, and they will not tell you.
The phrases worth getting right
These are the ones that carry the card. If you write nothing else in their language, write the opening line.
Three things worth knowing about that table.
Portuguese "thank you" changes with who is saying it, not who is receiving it. A man writes obrigado. A woman writes obrigada. This one is noticed, every time, and getting it right is a small signal that you actually tried.
Greek Χρόνια πολλά does not literally mean happy birthday. It means "many years", and Greeks use it for birthdays, name days and most religious holidays. It is warmer and more useful than a literal translation would be, which is exactly why a translation app will not give it to you.
Spanish "Enhorabuena" is for achievements, "Felicidades" is for occasions. A new job gets enhorabuena. A birthday gets felicidades. Using the wrong one is not offensive, it is just slightly off, in the way that "congratulations on your birthday" is slightly off in English.
Say the specific thing
Specificity survives translation better than warmth does, because a fact has one meaning and a feeling has several.
"You are such a special person and mean the world to us" is hard to translate well. It is abstract, and every language does abstract affection differently.
"Thank you for the soup you brought when Dad was in hospital" translates perfectly, because it is a soup and a hospital and a father, and those exist everywhere.
If you only have three lines, spend them on something that happened rather than something you feel. The feeling comes through the fact.
Two things not to do
Do not translate a joke. Wordplay, rhymes and anything built on a double meaning will either collapse into nonsense or, worse, come out as an unrelated sentence that sounds oddly serious. Puns are the first casualty of any translation.
Do not sign off with something you have not checked. English sign-offs are unusually loose. "Lots of love" translated word for word is anywhere from odd to inappropriate depending on the language and the recipient. Safer options that land more or less everywhere: their name, then yours. "Con cariño", "Mit lieben Grüßen", "Avec toute mon affection" all work, but check the register against the tu/vous choice you already made.
Getting a card there at all
If they are abroad, the post is the harder problem, and it is worth reading how the timings actually work before you rely on it.
A digital card sidesteps it entirely. You write the message, it lands the same day, and they open it on their phone wherever they are. If you want something physical as well, a printed card can go to them directly or to you first, so you can carry it over at Christmas.
One practical note: The Card Genie is available in several languages, so if you send the link to someone in France or Greece or Brazil, the page they land on reads in theirs rather than in English. The message itself is yours to write, which is the part this post is really about.
Whatever you use, write the short version. Then write the specific thing. That is most of it.
Make a card in a couple of minutes, or browse occasions if you are not sure where to start.