A lot of SaaS and e-commerce companies run on English written by people for whom it’s a second language. The product team is in Lisbon, support is in Kraków, the founders grew up speaking Russian or Spanish, and the customers are in the US, the UK and Canada. The English is usually good. Spelling is checked, the grammar mostly holds up. And still, something reads slightly off.
That “slightly off” is rarely a typo. It’s phrasing that is technically correct but that no native speaker would choose: “I would like to inform you that your order is shipped”, “please send the report until Friday”, “how do you think, should we postpone?”. A spell checker passes all three. A customer in Ohio notices all three, and quietly files your company under “not quite established”.
This article is about where that costs you, the patterns behind it, and a workflow that fixes it across a team without hiring a native copywriter for every Slack message.
Why “correct” isn’t the bar for customer-facing writing
Buyers use the quality of your writing as a shortcut for the quality of your business. They can’t inspect your codebase or your warehouse, but they can read your pricing page. In a widely cited 2013 UK survey by the translation company Global Lingo, 59% of respondents said they would not use a company whose website or marketing had obvious spelling or grammar mistakes.
Obvious mistakes are the easy half, and most teams already catch them. The harder half is English that is free of errors but sounds translated. It doesn’t trigger a red underline, so it survives every review, and it shows up in the places where trust matters most: the checkout, the cancellation email, the reply to an angry customer. A native reader can’t always say what’s wrong with it. They just feel the distance.
For conversion that distance is real. A pricing page that sounds stiff reads as less confident. A support reply that sounds formal and slightly odd reads as scripted. A cold email that sounds translated reads as spam. None of these will show up in a grammar report, and all of them show up in your numbers.
Where translated-sounding English hurts most
Not every sentence matters equally. When we audit a growing SaaS or e-commerce company, these are the places where the wording has the most direct line to revenue:
- Pricing, plan and checkout pages. Hesitation here costs money immediately. Plan names, feature bullets and the small print under the “Buy” button deserve the most care.
- Onboarding and transactional emails. Welcome emails, receipts, trial-ending reminders and password resets are read by every customer, and they set the tone for the relationship.
- Support replies and live chat. These are written fast, under pressure, often by the least senior person on the team, and they reach customers at their most frustrated.
- Sales outreach and follow-ups. In a cold email, sounding like a template or a translation is the fastest way to the archive.
- Product microcopy. Buttons, empty states, error messages and tooltips. Small, everywhere, and rarely reviewed by anyone outside the product team.
- Release notes and changelogs. For SaaS they double as marketing for existing customers, and they’re usually written by engineers at the end of a sprint.
- Shared Slack channels with customers and partners. B2B teams increasingly talk to clients in Slack Connect or Teams, which means internal-style messages are now customer-facing.
The patterns to look for
Translated-sounding English follows a handful of recurring patterns. Once a team can name them, they start spotting them in their own drafts.
1. Word-for-word translation
The structure of the writer’s first language shows through. “How do you think, should we postpone the release?” is a direct translation from several languages; a native speaker writes “What do you think, should we push back the release?”. “It is not big” becomes “It’s pretty small”.
2. Stiff, over-formal phrasing
Many people learned business English from formal letters, so everything comes out as a formal letter. “I would like to inform you that I will be absent tomorrow” is correct and sounds like a court summons. In most modern companies, “Just a heads-up: I’m out tomorrow” is the right register, and the formal version actually reads as cold.
3. Prepositions
Prepositions rarely map one-to-one between languages, which makes them the most common tell. “Send me the report until Friday” should be “by Friday”. “We discussed it on the meeting” should be “in the meeting”. “Look on my PR” should be “look at my PR”.
4. Missing or extra articles
Speakers of Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and other languages without articles drop them; others add them where English doesn’t use them. “I sent you link to document in Slack” needs two: “I sent you a link to the document in Slack”. One missing article is invisible; three in a paragraph make the whole text feel foreign.
5. False friends
Words that look like a word in your language but mean something else. “Actual” is used for “current” by speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, German and Russian (“the actual version of the app”). “Eventually” is used for “possibly”. “Sympathetic” for “nice”. Each one changes the meaning slightly, and in a contract or a pricing page “slightly” can be expensive.
6. The wrong tone for the moment
The same message needs a different register for a teammate, a customer and an investor. “Can we move the call to Thursday? I’ve got a conflict” is right for a colleague. “Would it be possible to move our call to Thursday? I have a conflict at that time” is right for a client you’ve never met. Non-native writers often have only one register available, and it’s usually the wrong one.
A workflow that scales across the team
Telling people to “write better English” doesn’t work, and a native editor reviewing every message doesn’t scale. What works is a short, boring process that puts the effort where it pays.
Step 1. Fix the pages that carry money first
Make a list of the ten pieces of text every paying customer sees: the pricing page, the checkout, the signup flow, the welcome email, the receipt, the trial-ending email, the cancellation flow, the top three support macros. Have a native speaker rewrite those once, properly. This is the highest-return copy work most teams will ever do, and it’s a few days, not a project.
Step 2. Write a one-page style sheet
Decide on US or UK spelling and stick to it. List your product and feature names exactly as they should be written. Pick the default register (most SaaS brands are “friendly, direct, no jargon”) and give two examples of it. Add the five phrases your team overuses and their replacements. One page is enough; nobody reads ten.
Step 3. Turn repeated answers into templates
Support and sales repeat themselves. Every answer that gets written more than a few times a week should exist as a reviewed template in your help desk or CRM. That moves a big share of customer-facing text from “written in a hurry” to “written once, carefully”.
Step 4. Give people a tool at the point of writing
Everything else, the everyday emails, chat replies, tickets and Slack messages, is written live. The only fix that survives contact with a busy day is one that works where people are already typing, takes a second, and doesn’t require them to copy text into another window and back. If fixing a message costs thirty seconds of copy-and-paste, it won’t happen on the fortieth message of the day.
Tools: what each one is actually good at
There’s no single right tool, and most teams end up with two. Here’s how the common options compare for this specific problem: English that is correct but doesn’t sound native.
- Grammarly. Strong at catching mistakes and works in many apps through its extensions. Its strength is correction: it flags what’s wrong, which is the first half of the problem.
- ChatGPT, Claude and other chat assistants. Excellent rewrites when given a good prompt, but every fix means copying text into a chat window and back, and every person on the team prompts a little differently, so the results vary.
- Apple Writing Tools. Built into recent versions of macOS on Macs that support Apple Intelligence: proofreading and rewriting from the context menu, with nothing to install.
- AI Grammatic. The one we built for exactly this problem. On a Mac, you select text in any app, press ⌘⌥E, and it’s replaced in place with the way a native speaker would say it, including the tone. Add Shift for a formal version, and give each language its own shortcut to write in one language and get another.
Disclosure, since it’s our own product: we designed and built AI Grammatic for teams like the ones we work with, after watching the same phrasing problems show up in client copy for years. It works in Slack, Mail, Gmail, Notion, Jira, Linear, Figma, code editors and anything else where you can select text, and it has a free plan of 10 rewrites a day if you want to try it on your own drafts. The page on writing at work in English as a second language shows the before-and-after examples in more detail, and you can read how we built it in our case studies.
Whichever tool you choose, judge it on one test: does it change “please send the report until Friday” to “please send the report by Friday”? A tool that only catches spelling won’t, and that’s the gap that costs you.
How to tell if it’s working
Copy changes are measurable like any other change. The useful signals:
- Pricing and checkout conversion before and after the rewrite, ideally as an A/B test if you have the traffic for it.
- Reply rate on outreach sequences, comparing the old and the rewritten versions on similar lists.
- Support satisfaction scores and the share of tickets that need a second reply because the first one wasn’t understood.
- Trial-to-paid conversion after the onboarding emails are rewritten.
- Refund and cancellation reasons that mention confusion about what the product does or what the customer was charged for.
You won’t see a dramatic jump from fixing a few prepositions. You will see the quiet compounding effect of every customer-facing message sounding like it came from a company that knows exactly what it’s doing.
The short version
- Correct English isn’t the bar for customer-facing text; native-sounding English is.
- The costly problems are the ones grammar checkers miss: translated structures, stiff formality, prepositions, articles, false friends and the wrong tone.
- Rewrite the ten texts every paying customer sees, write a one-page style sheet, and template your repeated answers.
- For everything written live, give the team a tool that works in place, in a second.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on the pages that carry your revenue, that’s the kind of thing we look at with clients at Belov Digital Agency, alongside the analytics, ads and SEO that usually get the attention.
