Formatting a Salutation Correctly Across Languages

“Dear Ms Alvarez,” translated into German gives “Sehr geehrte Frau Alvarez,” which is correct, followed by a capital letter, which is not. The words came across; the rule attached to the punctuation did not.

The template carries its punctuation across

A salutation is a small piece of text with a large amount of convention attached, and translation moves the words while leaving the convention behind. The three things that vary are the punctuation mark after the greeting, whether a name may follow the title, and what the punctuation implies about the sentence that follows. Models handle the first badly and the third almost never, because the third is not visible in the salutation line at all.

The failure is legible but marked. Nobody is confused by a letter with the wrong salutation punctuation; they simply register it as machine output or as a foreigner’s letter, which in formal correspondence is exactly the impression the formality was meant to avoid.

English: the colon is American

In US business correspondence the formal opening takes a colon:

US business    Dear Ms. Alvarez:
US personal    Dear Maria,
UK business    Dear Ms Alvarez,
UK, unknown    Dear Sir or Madam,

The colon is a US business-letter convention; a comma there reads as personal rather than as wrong. British usage takes a comma throughout and additionally omits the full stop after contracted titles: Mr, Mrs, Ms and Dr have no point in British style because the abbreviation ends with the same letter the full word does, while Prof. does take one. A generated letter with “Dear Mr. Smith,” is mixing the two conventions in four words.

One structural rule carries into every language below: if you open without knowing the name, the closing changes. British usage pairs “Dear Sir or Madam” with “Yours faithfully” and a named “Dear Ms Alvarez” with “Yours sincerely”. A template that fills the name conditionally and the sign-off unconditionally gets this wrong exactly when the name is missing.

German: the comma changes the next word

The standard formal opening is:

Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Müller,

vielen Dank für Ihre Nachricht vom 3. August.

The comma is not a decoration. It makes the salutation the first clause of the sentence that follows, so the body begins with a lowercase letter — vielen, not Vielen — unless the first word is a noun or a formal pronoun, which in German are capitalised anyway. A blank line separates them and the lowercase continuation is still required.

This is the rule that translated templates break most reliably, because the capital letter is in the body string rather than in the salutation string, and nothing in the translation of the salutation touches it. Older German usage put an exclamation mark after the salutation, which did take a capital afterwards; it is now archaic, so seeing it in generated text is a sign the model reached for a historical register.

The gendered adjective ending is the other trap: geehrte for a woman, geehrter for a man, and geehrte Damen und Herren for an unknown recipient. And the academic title is not optional in formal German correspondence — a Dr or Prof. Dr belongs in the salutation, and omitting it is noticed.

French: no name, and a closing that quotes back

Formal French correspondence uses the title alone, with no surname:

Madame,
Monsieur,
Madame, Monsieur,          (recipient unknown)

Cher Monsieur Dupont,      (over-familiar for a first contact)

“Cher” plus a surname, which is the direct translation of “Dear Mr Dupont”, is warmer than a formal French letter intends and is what a model produces by default. The neutral formal opening is the bare title and a comma.

Then the rule that a template cannot survive: the formal French closing repeats the salutation verbatim inside it.

Madame,

...

Je vous prie d'agréer, Madame, l'expression de mes salutations distinguées.

If the opening is “Madame, Monsieur,” the closing must say “Madame, Monsieur” too. So the salutation and the sign-off are not independent template slots — changing one requires changing the other, and generated letters routinely open to a woman and close to “Monsieur” because the closing was a fixed string.

Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese

• Spanish takes a colon. Estimado Sr. García: or Estimada Sra. García:, with the gendered ending on the adjective. The very formal register is Muy señor mío: — and note that señor is lowercase there, as titles generally are in Spanish when spelled out.
• Dutch takes a comma — Geachte heer De Vries, — and carries a capitalisation rule of its own for the particle. In de Vries, the tussenvoegsel is lowercase when a first name or initial precedes it (Jan de Vries) and capitalised when the surname stands alone (meneer De Vries). A template that stores “de Vries” as one field and drops it into both positions is wrong in one of them.
• Chinese uses a full-width colon. 尊敬的张经理：with U+FF1A FULLWIDTH COLON, not U+003A. The body then begins on the next line, conventionally indented by two full-width spaces. Using the ASCII colon produces visibly wrong spacing in a CJK font because the full-width form occupies a whole character cell.
• Japanese uses no punctuation at all. The recipient block is 山田太郎様 or 山田様, with the honorific 様 suffixed directly to the name and nothing after it. A business email then opens with the fixed formula いつもお世話になっております。A formal letter instead uses the paired 拝啓 to open and 敬具 to close, and the pair must match — another case, like French, where the opening and the closing are one decision rather than two.

The variable you do not have

Half the rules above need the recipient’s gender: geehrte or geehrter, Estimado or Estimada, Cher or Chère, Madame or Monsieur. Your template variable is a name, and a name does not carry it reliably across cultures.

A model asked to fill the slot will infer gender from the name, and it will do so confidently and wrongly for a meaningful fraction of recipients — unisex names, names from naming traditions it has less data on, and every recipient for whom the inference is simply not the right thing to do. The inference is invisible in the output because the result is a grammatical, fluent letter either way.

The workable options are to collect a salutation preference explicitly, to use the gender-neutral formal opening the language provides (Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, Madame Monsieur, Estimado equipo, “Dear Alex Rivera” with the full name and no title), or to address the organisation rather than the person. All three are better than a guess, and the second is the one that stays formal. This overlaps with the broader question of which honorifics and titles apply in which locale, which is worth settling once rather than per template.