Most people using the products I work on are reading in a language that isn't their first. Many are doing it at the end of a long day, on a phone, in a situation where getting it wrong costs them something real.
The thing I keep relearning: they are not bad at the task. The task is being delivered through a layer they have to fight. Every bit of that layer you remove comes straight back to them.
Here is what I've learned about removing it.
Negation is the single most expensive construction
"Which of the following is not required when…"
A fluent reader handles this without noticing. A second-language reader has to hold the entire option list in working memory and invert it, in a language they are translating as they go, often with time pressure on top. The interaction stops measuring whether they understand the subject and starts measuring processing load.
Formal source material is full of negation and you often can't change that — but everything around it is yours. Explanations, hints, onboarding, settings labels. I write those in the positive wherever there's a choice, and when I can't, the negation gets visual weight so it is impossible to skim past.
Double negation — "which is not permitted unless…" — I treat as a defect.
Short sentences are not dumbing down
There's a reflex, especially when the source material is legal or technical, to write in its register. Long clauses, stacked conditions, formal connectives.
That register exists for precision, not comprehension. You can keep the precision and lose the sentence length: one idea per sentence, conditions as a list rather than a chain, the subject near the verb.
What this is not is simplification of content. These are adults doing something that matters to them. Patronizing them is its own failure, and they notice it faster than you'd think. The goal is to make the language transparent so the difficulty lives entirely in the subject, which is where it belongs.
Translation is not the same as localization
Translating a sentence correctly and making it usable are different jobs.
A term of art may have no equivalent in the target language. The honest handling is often to give the translation and keep the original term alongside it — because they will meet the original out in the world regardless. Someone who only ever sees the translated version encounters the real one for the first time at the worst possible moment.
That means some things deliberately stay untranslated. Working out which is domain judgment, not a language decision, and it's the part that can't be outsourced to a translator who doesn't know the domain.
Icons help less than you want them to
Icons feel like the obvious fix for a language barrier. In practice they are their own vocabulary, and one that is strongly culturally conditioned. A floppy disk means save to people who have never seen a floppy disk, and means nothing to people who have never seen the convention.
Where icons genuinely help: reinforcing a label you have already written in words. Where they fail: replacing it. I use them as redundancy, not as compression — the exception being domain symbols the user has to recognize anyway, where showing them is the content.
Time pressure multiplies everything
Every problem above gets worse under a clock, and a great many interfaces have one — a session that expires, a form that times out, a decision someone is making while a queue builds behind them. A sentence that costs a fluent reader two seconds and a second-language reader eight is a rounding error once and a catastrophe across a whole flow.
So I treat reading time as a real budget. If a screen can be understood in one pass without re-reading, it's done. If my eye goes back, it isn't — and my eye is the easy case.
Don't make them read anything they don't have to
The highest-leverage work isn't rewriting sentences. It's removing screens.
Every piece of interface copy is a tax paid in a second language. Onboarding that explains a feature the user could discover in two taps, a confirmation dialog for a reversible action, a tooltip restating the label it's attached to — in English these are mild clutter. Here they are a cost with no return.
Why this matters beyond this audience
Everything above is just good interface writing with the volume turned up. Short sentences, positive constructions, words doing real work, fewer screens — none of it is special pleading for non-native speakers. It's what helps a tired native speaker on a phone at eleven at night too.
Designing for the harder case makes the easy case better. It just makes the failures impossible to ignore, which is the useful part.
I build and operate multilingual mobile applications, shipped across ten languages. More at akmalu.com.
Top comments (1)
The cultural vocabulary point is important. Have you ever localized the icon itself, not just its label, when the same symbol carries different assumptions across audiences?