By name: german-technical-writing description: "Use when writing German-language prose longer than one sentence for Jira tickets, internal German wiki/spec docs, or team-chat to German-speaking colleagues (Slack, Matrix, Teams). Invoke BEFORE composing, not after. Enforces natural German technical register by catching English→German anglicisms (brechen, gefangen, returnen, triggern, failen, die Test, hit, end up) and substituting canonical verbs (werfen, abfangen, zurückgeben, auslösen, fehlschlagen, der Test, auf … stoßen, landen). Also enforces present-indicative tense, impersonal voice, and Denglisch-loanword lexicon (der Commit, die Pipeline, der Branch, die Exception). Skip for commit messages, MR/PR descriptions, release notes (English by team convention), conversational chat replies, internal reasoning, single-line acknowledgments ('Ok', 'Danke'), or English artifacts containing German identifiers. If you catch yourself thinking 'my German is probably fine here' for anything longer than a sentence — invoke this skill." license: "(MIT AND CC-BY-SA-4.0). See LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-CC-BY-SA-4.0" compatibility: "Language-only skill. No runtime dependencies." metadata: author: Netresearch DTT GmbH version: "1.2.1" repository: https://github.com/netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill allowed-tools: Read
German Technical Writing
Natural German technical register for German-audience artifacts. Prevents English-first composition plus phrase-by-phrase translation, which produces grammatically correct German that reads as DeepL-output to native readers.
Process
- Compose in German directly, not by translating. Restart if you catch yourself drafting English first.
- Self-review each sentence against
references/anti-patterns.md. - Apply the lexicon — canonical verbs and loanword gender:
references/lexicon.md. - Match register — Präsens-Indikativ, impersonal voice, no first-person:
references/register.md. - If unsure, ask — don't guess.
Top anti-patterns
| ❌ | ✅ |
|---|---|
| code bricht | schlägt fehl / wirft Exception |
| gefangen | erkannt / abgefangen |
| null returnen | null zurückgeben |
| Test failt | schlägt fehl / fällt durch |
| Fehler triggern | Fehler auslösen |
| auf Fehler hitten | auf Fehler stoßen |
Full ~60-entry catalogue plus pseudo-anglicisms and idiom calques in references/anti-patterns.md. Worked pair-examples in references/examples.md.
Two opposite traps — apply both disciplines
Two failure modes — over-applying one drives you into the other:
- Anglicism (verb-level): keeping English when German is canonical. Test failt → schlägt fehl. Fehler triggern → Fehler auslösen. The table above and
anti-patterns.mdtarget this. - Calque / overcorrection (compound-noun-level): translating English when the loanword is canonical. Wurzelursache → Root Cause. Wettlaufbedingung → Race Condition. Speicherleck → Memory Leak. See
anti-patterns.md("Compound-noun calques") andlexicon.md("Debugging / Postmortem / Analysis").
Decision rule for nouns: if a native German developer would say the term verbatim in a code review or stand-up, keep it English. The litmus test isn't "does a German equivalent exist?" — it's "do German engineers actually use it in everyday speech?" A German form that sounds like a textbook chapter title is a calque.
Absorbing "use German verbs" without "keep loanword nouns" produces DeepL-grade output. Apply both simultaneously.
Scope note
Commit messages, MR/PR descriptions, release notes and internal IT-project tickets (Netresearch: NRS, NRT, SRV*, IO*, LIC) are English — skip them. This skill governs how to write German, never whether German is the right choice.