Even after several years of English lessons, many people find it difficult to express themselves in writing in the foreign language. If you formulate sentence after sentence in German in your head and then translate it, you will produce acceptable but somewhat clumsy texts. It’s good if someone takes another look at it!
So-called writing assistants apply as meticulous counter-readers. They are aimed primarily at English-speaking users, helping them correct grammatical errors, careless errors and typos. They also want to improve language style by pointing out convoluted sentences, replacing meaningless adjectives or adverbs with precise alternatives, or warning against excessive use of the passive voice.
The following test is dedicated to the question of what benefits the services offer to users whose native language is not English but German. There are many typical German English errors. At the word level, for example, there is a danger from “false friends”. This means English vocabulary that is similar to German words but has nothing to do with them. For example, “chef” in English means cook and not supervisor, “actual” means “really” or “in fact” and not “current”. Even more difficult are words that sometimes work as a translation of a similar German word, but in other cases don’t. So “false” is definitely appropriate when it comes to “wrong” in the sense of “insincere” – but “wrong” is more suitable as a translation of “not correct”.
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