Website Copy in a Second Language: What Audits Miss and How to Fix It

A website audit is good at finding things a machine can measure. A slow hero image, a missing meta description, a broken link, a form with no labels: each one fails a rule, and each one shows up in a report. Copy written in a second language fails no rule at all. The spelling is right, the grammar mostly holds, every page passes. And a visitor from London or Chicago still reads the homepage and feels that something is off.

That feeling has a cost, and it sits on the pages that matter most for conversion. This guide covers what translated-sounding copy looks like, where to look for it first, and how to fix it without rewriting the whole site.

What a technical audit can't see

There are three layers to the quality of website copy, and automated checks only reach the first.

1. Errors. Typos and grammar mistakes. Spell checkers and grammar tools catch most of them.
2. Naturalness. Sentences that are correct but no native speaker would write: "Our company is engaged in the development of software" instead of "We build software". Nothing flags these.
3. Tone. Copy that is natural but pitched wrong for the moment: a checkout that reads like a legal notice, an error message that reads like a reprimand.

Most sites built by non-native teams have cleaned up layer one. Layers two and three are where the trust leaks out, because visitors notice them even when they can't name them.

Why it matters for conversion and search

Visitors judge a business they can't inspect by the things they can. Copy is one of those things. A pricing page that sounds stiff reads as less confident; a product page that sounds translated reads as a reseller rather than the maker; a contact form that says "we will contact with you" makes people hesitate before handing over their email.

Search engines care too, though less directly. Google's representatives have said grammar isn't a direct ranking factor, but Google's own guide to creating helpful content lists "Does the content have any spelling or stylistic issues?" among the questions it asks site owners to judge their pages by. Copy that reads as careless sits on the wrong side of that question. And as more people meet your site through AI answers rather than a search results page, clear, idiomatic sentences are simply easier to quote and summarise correctly than awkward ones.

Where to look first

You don't need to review every page. Start with the copy that sits on the path to a conversion:

• The hero headline and subheadline. The first two sentences most visitors read, and often the last.
• Calls to action. Button labels are short, so a single unnatural word stands out. "Make an order" should be "Place an order"; "Get acquainted with our offers" should be "See our plans".
• Pricing and plan descriptions. Feature bullets, plan names and the small print near the payment button.
• Forms, validation and error messages. These are written by developers, rarely reviewed, and read at the moment a visitor is most likely to give up. Our guide to reducing form friction covers the structure; the wording deserves the same care.
• Meta titles and descriptions. They're copy too: the snippet is the first sentence of your site that a searcher reads, and its wording decides whether they click.
• Alt text. It's read aloud by screen readers and indexed by search engines, so it needs to sound like a person wrote it. See our alt text guide for examples.
• Transactional emails. Not on the site, but part of the same experience: the order confirmation is often the second thing a new customer reads from you.

The patterns behind translated-sounding copy

Once you know the patterns, you can spot them in a page in a couple of minutes.

Structures carried over from another language

"Who we are?" as a heading, "Information about delivery" instead of "Delivery", "Our company is engaged in..." instead of a plain verb. The sentence is grammatical in the writer's first language and nearly grammatical in English, which is why it survives proofreading.

Over-formal, letter-style phrasing

"Please be informed that our office will be closed" or "We kindly ask you to fill in the form below". Formal phrasing reads as distant on a modern website. "Our office is closed on Monday" and "Fill in the form below" say the same thing and sound like a company you'd want to talk to.

Prepositions and articles

"Send your request and we will contact with you", "valid until 30 days", "sign up on our newsletter", "download free guide". These are the most frequent tells, because prepositions and articles rarely map one-to-one between languages.

False friends

"Actual prices" for current prices, "eventually" for possibly, "sympathetic" for friendly, "realise" for carry out. Each one changes the meaning slightly, and on a pricing or terms page that matters.

One tone for everything

Copy written in a second language often has a single register, used everywhere: the same tone for a playful product tour and for a refund policy. If you're not sure where the line between casual and formal sits in English, this guide to casual vs formal English has side-by-side examples for the most common situations.

How to fix it without a full rewrite

1. List the conversion path. Homepage hero, the main product or service page, pricing, signup or checkout, the confirmation page and the first email. That's usually fewer than ten pieces of copy.
2. Get those rewritten by a native speaker once. A day or two of a good copywriter's time on these pages is worth more than any amount of polish elsewhere.
3. Write a one-page style sheet. US or UK spelling, how your product and feature names are written, your default tone with two examples, and the five phrases your team overuses with what to write instead.
4. Fix it where the copy is written. Most new copy isn't written in a CMS editor by a copywriter. It's written in a ticket, a design file or a code editor by whoever builds the page. That's where a check has to happen, and it only happens if it takes seconds.

For that last step, a tool that rewrites in place does the most good. Grammar checkers catch the first layer. Chat assistants can do the second and third, but only if every person copies text into a chat window and prompts it well every time. AI Grammatic, a Mac app made by the same team as Webmatik, does it in place: select text in any app, including Figma and code editors, press ⌘⌥E, and it's replaced with the way a native speaker would put it, with Shift for a more formal version. It has a free plan if you want to try it on your own pages.

Then audit the rest

Copy is one part of how a page performs. The other parts, speed, SEO, AI search visibility, UX, conversion and security, are exactly what a Webmatik audit checks across 70+ signals. Run it on the pages you just rewrote, fix what it finds, and you'll have a conversion path that works for machines and reads right to people.