O verbo pretender

There is one verb that the Portuguese misuse a lot: "pretender". Let's say it's "to aim" in English. Well sometimes they forget to translate the word in English, and write "pretend" instead, so I'm always laughing so much when I see texts like "In this manual we pretend to define a set of rules..." or like today, a professor said that "In this project you pretend to improve an existing interactive model..." lolololololololooooooool