How to change the event text
You can customize the way the events are spelled out in iCal any way you want. To do that, in the main screen, in the “What should the events look like?” section, hit “Change”:

In the popup box, choose one of the text pattern you like.
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If you do not like any of the suggested patterns, you can make your own. Just define them in the text field below. You can use the following placeholders, which get replaced when the events are generated:
$firstname - the first name of the jubilee. If none is found in Address Book, it is omitted
$lastname - the last name of the jubilee. If none is found in Address Book, it is omitted
$title - the title (prefix) of the jubilee, e.g. “Dr”. If none is found in Address Book, it is omitted
$company - the company name of the jubilee, if one is given. If none is found in Address Book, it is omitted
$what - this expands to the text describing the event. Usually this is “Birthday”, but it can be “Anniversary” or whatever you entered in Address Book when you added those dates (see also How do I add other dates to an Address Book contact),
$symbol - this is a little symbol. For birthdays, this is a birth mark (✼).
$years - the number of years - in case of birthdays, the age of the jubilee.
Please Note: If the event title contains the year count of the event ($years), the event text in iCal will change for each year - because the count goes up. This means that iCal will not allow you to modify all events manually as one series after importing. If that is important to you, do not use $years.
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Example:
Use the event text to provide a localized form of the word “Birthday”:

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