Three Ideas for Multicultural and Destination Weddings
Arnaud and I after our wedding ceremony in Normandy, France. July 25, 2018.
If your wedding takes place far from home for one or both of you, or if your wedding combines two very different cultures, you can add a few creative touches to your marriage ceremony and events that will help your guests have a more enjoyable—and memorable!—experience.
If you seek new and creative ideas for your multicultural, bilingual, or destination wedding, I have a few based on my own experience. Here are a few things we did for our French-American wedding in France that our guests truly appreciated.
Hire Translators
If you have wedding guests and family members coming together from different cultures and with different languages, having translators on your team will help everyone feel like they can participate, understand, and communicate throughout your wedding and wedding events.
Most of our wedding guests were French; we had only about a third of the people at our wedding come from the United States.
Of the two groups, only a very small number (perhaps three from both sides combined) spoke both English and French.
We wanted to enable English-French communication for three main reasons:
To ensure that the two groups could intermingle and that we didn’t have the people from the United States segregated from the French (and vice versa).
To ensure that the French speakers could understand the English-language portion of the ceremony and the English-language speeches (and vice versa).
To ensure that the handful of people who spoke English and French didn’t feel obligated to provide free translation services all night.
Deciding to hire translators to mingle with guests to facilitate conversation and to interpret the main events was easy. The hard part? Figuring out how to make that happen—especially in a relatively rural part of Normandy.
Translators come in many varieties. Predominantly, you have translators who work with written text and you have translators and interpreters who work with off-the-cuff speeches and conversations. The two skill sets have overlap, yet the ability to do one does not de facto lend itself to doing the other.
For a wedding, you will want to find translators who work with off-the-cuff speeches and conversations. We had two translators at the ceremony and reception to allow for more mingling and to give them each periodic brain breaks. (Translation is challenging work, especially when translating a variety of spontaneous conversations on myriad subjects between people you don’t know.)
Arnaud’s cousin, Erwan (in black), speaking during our wedding ceremony with one of the two translators we had in attendance. The translator did an amazing job translating off-the-cuff a highly inventive, dramatic, and also comic short tale Erwan had written for the occasion. Normady, France. July 25, 2018.
Our wedding planner found the translators through a company in France that provides translators and interpreters for conferences; as a starting point, research groups and associations of this nature in or near the location of your wedding. (Our translators, who mainly worked business events, said that our wedding was the most fun translating job they’d had.)
Hire Professional Tour Guides
We held our wedding in Normandy, France, so we had several options for local historical sites to share with our guests coming from the United States.
We had extra good fortune in that Arnaud’s sister is a professional tour guide based in Paris. As a wedding gift, she developed a custom tour for our guests at the site of our choice. (We took them to William the Conqueror’s castle in Falaise.)
Though our guests could have visited the castle solo, as they did with other sites in the area during their visits, offering a professional tour with a dedicated guide gives a personalized experience—especially if the portion of your guests coming to a different country for your wedding doesn’t speak the host country’s language. (Yes, you can find plenty of fluent English speakers in Paris. Outside of Paris, you’ll have a little more difficulty in communicating, touring, and wayfinding in France.)
A historical site, a professional tour with fun insights tailored to the group, easy communication in the guests’ native language, and transportation or clear guidance on navigating to the tour location will make a huge difference in giving your guests a fun experience to remember.
Schedule a Cultural Experience
Even if your location doesn’t have historical or cultural sites for touring, you can still schedule a cultural experience. Every place in the world has something different to offer—which means that the location of your wedding does, too.
Lost for ideas? Use these prompts as starting points:
If the region has a signature dish or style of cooking, offer your guests a cooking class with a local chef in a restaurant, property, or even home (depending on the size of your wedding party).
Does the area have an indigenous type of music or dance? If so, consider providing a cultural lesson in the music with a musician or music historian from the local community or school. If that sounds too dry for your group, have a dance instructor come in to teach a few of the music’s or culture’s typical dance moves.
Many regions have indigenous arts and crafts; how about a lesson in how to make these items—with extra bonus points if you can find someone to make the class a hands-on experience with something fun to take away.
If the area features a unique game or sport, either take your group to a match or have a coach come in and teach them the game. (If they need athletic wear, don’t forget to prompt them to pack some!)
Most places have natural beauty. (Even New York City has amazing parks in the city and surrounding areas.) Hire a guide to take your group on a local nature or wildlife tour.
Wherever you plan your wedding to take place, you can absolutely find local cultural experiences to share with your guests.
And remember that you can flip cultural references as well: If you have your wedding in France but want to show the French food or fun from your part of the United States, go for it! We had an American wedding cake in addition to the traditional French croquembouche and incorporated a Quaker marriage certificate into our ceremony as well.
Our classic French croquembouche, traditional at French weddings, and our American-style wedding cake, a standard at American weddings. (Confession: The croquembouche may not look as lovely, but it sure tastes better.) Normandy, France. July 25, 2018.
Further Ideas?
Did you have any special touches to create a cohesive experience at your multicultural or destination wedding that brought together unique cultures and languages? If so, I’d love to hear them!
And if you’d like more information and ideas on wedding planning—particularly wedding planning for weddings in France—visit my special French-American weddings section.