A bilingual wedding website for guests from abroad

A bilingual wedding invitation without a second print run

Paper forces a choice: either you print a separate run for guests who do not read Polish, or part of the table gets a card they cannot use. A QR code on the invitation removes that choice. The printed card stays exactly as you want it, and the website behind the code opens in two languages. One code for everyone, each guest reads it their own way.

When it is actually worth it

You do not need a half-international wedding. One of these is enough:

• ·Family who moved away. A cousin in England, an aunt in the Netherlands, friends in Germany. They are flying in for one weekend and everything they know about the day will come from your website.
• ·A partner from outside Poland. Then half the guest list does not speak Polish, and that is not an edge case, it is half the room.
• ·Colleagues. In international companies these are often people who live in Poland but read Polish slowly.
• ·A wedding in Poland with guests scattered around the world. The hardest version, because on top of directions you have to cover accommodation, currency and customs that nobody here thinks to explain.

For two or three people a phone call is enough. From a dozen or so, you start answering the same questions in English over and over for six months.

What genuinely needs translating

Not everything. A guest from abroad is looking for specifics, usually in this order:

1. Date, time and place - with an address that can be pasted straight into a satnav.
2. The RSVP. The whole form has to be in English, including the questions about dietary needs and accommodation. A half-translated form is worse than none, because someone will tick a box blindly.
3. The running order. When the ceremony starts, when dinner is served, when the first dance happens. Someone from abroad has no way of knowing that a Polish wedding runs until morning.
4. Getting there and staying over. From the airport, not from the city centre. That distinction is easy to miss when you plan from the point of view of a guest arriving by car.
5. Dress code and customs. Oczepiny, poprawiny, an envelope instead of a gift. For an outside guest none of this is obvious, and all of it will come back to you as questions.

What does not need translating: poems, quotations and anything that is decoration. Forced into another language they lose the point and add nothing.

Two languages on paper against two languages behind the code

On paper every language is a separate print run: separate typesetting, separate printing, separate envelopes and separate stamps. Which is why almost nobody does it, and the guest from abroad ends up with a card they can read the date off and nothing else.

Behind a QR code a second language has no print run. It is built once and works the same whether twenty or a hundred guests read it. How paper and website divide the work between them is covered in a separate piece on a wedding website and paper invitations.

One code, two versions

The simplest arrangement that works: one address for everyone and a language switch in the corner of the page. You print a single QR code on the invitations rather than splitting the run into a Polish and an English batch. Nobody has to remember which link went to whom, and a guest who was forwarded the address by someone else still lands in the right place.

There is a second advantage that rarely comes up while you are sending invitations out: when the time or the venue changes a week before the wedding, you fix it in one place and both versions are correct immediately. With two print runs you would be ringing two groups separately.

How this works with us

All eleven themes come with a complete English version, at the same price of PLN 300 paid once. There is no surcharge for the second language and no separate package - it is standard, in the same way the RSVP or the gallery is.

In practice: you get one address, say kate-and-tom.naszwielkidzien.pl. There is a switch in the corner of the page. A guest in Poland does nothing, a guest in London taps once and gets the invitation, the RSVP form, the running order and the map in English. Every demo on our site can be switched with that same button, so it is worth clicking through one to see how it reads from a guest's side.

If you are wondering what else belongs on the page before you send the link out, we covered that in a piece on what a wedding website needs.