Using Translation Tools in Pen Pal Letters, Honestly
Machine translation can open a correspondence that would otherwise be impossible, or quietly hollow out one that was meant to teach you a language. Here is when to use it, how to write sentences it handles well, and why you should say so.
By Sander · October 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Somewhere in a lot of pen pal letters there is a sentence that was not quite written by the person who signed it.
That is not a scandal. Translation tools have made it possible to write to someone with whom you share no language at all. But used carelessly they produce letters that are fluent, polite and oddly empty — or that say something you did not mean, in a tone you would never have chosen.
First, decide what the letters are for
The right answer depends almost entirely on why you are writing.
If the point is friendship and you simply do not share a language, translation is a bridge, and there is nothing to apologise for. A correspondence between someone in Brazil and someone in Poland who both have only school English is better with a translation tool in the middle than not happening.
If the point is learning a language, translation is a crutch, and the more you lean on it the weaker the leg gets. A letter you pasted in and copied out teaches you roughly as much as a letter someone else wrote for you. If this is you, the method later in this piece matters more than anything else.
Most people are somewhere in between, which just means being deliberate about which parts you translate and which you struggle through yourself.
Say that you are using it
This is the part people skip, and it matters more than any technique.
If your pen pal does not know a tool is involved, they will read your letter as you. Every odd phrasing becomes a quirk of your personality; every slightly cold sentence becomes a sign you are a slightly cold person. And if they are learning your language, they may copy expressions that no human speaker would actually use.
One sentence fixes all of it:
"A quick confession: my English is not good enough for long letters yet, so I write in Dutch and use a translation tool, then check what I can. If anything sounds strange, it is probably the machine and not me!"
It also makes misunderstandings funny rather than hurtful. "I think the translator turned your cat into a carpet" is a much better letter than a confused silence.
Write sentences a machine can carry
Translation tools are at their best with plain, complete, literal sentences, and at their worst with exactly the kind of writing that makes a letter feel personal. You can meet them halfway by writing a simpler source text. This does not have to make you sound dull — it mostly makes you sound clear.
- One idea per sentence. Long sentences with several clauses are where meaning gets scrambled, especially when "it" or "they" could refer to more than one thing.
- Name things instead of using pronouns. "My sister and my mother argued, and she left" — who left? A human might guess; a machine will pick one.
- Avoid phrasal verbs where you can. "Put up with", "get on with", "make up" all have several meanings. "Tolerate", "like", "invent" or "become friends again" are less charming and far safer.
- Spell out abbreviations and slang. "Uni", "tbh", "the footy" and regional words are likely to come through mangled or not at all.
- Keep sarcasm out of translated passages. Irony depends on tone, and tone is the first thing lost.
A quick before and after. The original:
"Work's been mad, but I've finally got round to sorting out the garden, which my neighbour reckons is a lost cause anyway."
The version written for translation:
"Work has been very busy. But this weekend I finally had time to work in my garden. My neighbour thinks the garden is hopeless, but I do not agree."
The second is flatter in English, but far more likely to arrive intact.
Idioms, tone and the things that do not travel
Idioms are the classic trap. A tool may translate "it's raining cats and dogs" word for word, or may swap it for a local equivalent, and you often cannot tell which happened. The safest approach is to either avoid idioms in translated text or flag them deliberately: "We have a saying in English, 'raining cats and dogs', which just means very heavy rain." That turns a risk into a small cultural gift, which is what idioms are best for in letters anyway. There is more on this kind of exchange in the across cultures guide.
Tone is subtler. Many languages have formal and informal ways of saying "you", and a tool has to guess which one you meant. It may choose the formal version for a friend of three months, which can read as stiff, or the informal one in a first letter, which can read as presumptuous. If you know a little of the target language, this is one of the first things worth checking. If you do not, it is worth asking your pen pal: "Does my letter sound too formal? Please tell me if so."
Humour, warmth and politeness are also unevenly distributed across languages. A direct request that is perfectly normal in Dutch or German can come across as abrupt in English or Japanese; a softened English request ("I was wondering if you might possibly…") can become strangely grovelling in translation. When in doubt, add a plain sentence of feeling: "I am asking because I am curious, not because I want to be rude."
The method: draft yourself first, check after
If you are learning the language at all, this is the approach that keeps the learning in.
- Write the letter in the target language first, by yourself. Use what you have. Short sentences, wrong verb endings, gaps where you do not know a word — write "[word for 'wardrobe'?]" and carry on.
- Fill the gaps with a dictionary, not a full translation. Looking up single words keeps you constructing the sentence yourself.
- Only then run it through a translation tool — in reverse. Translate your text back into your own language. If what comes back means what you intended, the sentence probably works. If it comes back as nonsense, that sentence needs another look.
- Fix it yourself where you can. Where you genuinely cannot, borrow the tool's version — but write it out by hand or type it rather than pasting, and notice what was different.
- Keep a short list of what you got wrong. The same three mistakes tend to recur. Seeing them listed is how they stop.
This is slower than pasting, and the slowness is where the learning happens. The language exchange method builds a whole correspondence around this kind of back-and-forth, and writing letters in a second language covers confidence and mistakes in more depth.
Reading their letters
The same tools help in the other direction, with the same caveats. A translated letter from your pen pal is an approximation of what they wrote, so:
- Do not take offence at a single phrase. If something reads as rude or odd, assume translation first, and ask gently if it bothers you.
- Read the original alongside it if you are learning. Even a few recognised words are progress.
- Watch for names and places. Tools sometimes "translate" a surname or a street that should have been left alone. If your pen pal's friend is apparently called Mr Bread, it is worth checking.
When to put the tool away
There often comes a stage where translation stops helping: you are both mixing languages, and mistakes have become a shared joke. A perfectly translated paragraph then feels like a step backwards — tidier, and less like you.
Try writing one short paragraph a letter with no tool at all, and say so: "This part is just me, sorry in advance." It is almost always the paragraph they reply to first.
