Designing for people reading in their second language
Designing for people reading in their second language
为使用第二语言阅读的用户进行设计
Most people using the products I work on are preparing for a US licensing exam in a language that isn’t their first. Many are studying after a full shift. Some have not sat a formal written test in twenty years. The thing I keep relearning: they are not bad at the test. The test is being delivered through a layer they have to fight. Every bit of that layer you remove goes straight into their score. Here is what I’ve learned about removing it. 我所负责的产品，其用户大多是在用非母语准备美国的执照考试。许多人在上完一整天班后还在学习，有些人甚至二十年没参加过正式的笔试了。我不断重温的一个道理是：他们并非不擅长考试，而是考试本身被包裹在了一层他们必须与之抗争的“外壳”中。你每消除掉这层外壳的一小部分，都能直接转化为他们的分数。以下是我在消除这些障碍方面的经验。
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, while a timer runs. The question stops testing the subject and starts testing processing load. Official exam 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. 否定句是认知成本最高的句式，例如“以下哪项在……时是不需要的？”。母语读者可以不假思索地处理这类问题，但第二语言读者必须在计时器运行的同时，将整个选项列表保存在工作记忆中并进行逻辑反转，而且他们还得一边阅读一边进行语言翻译。此时，问题不再是在考察学科知识，而是在考察处理负荷。官方考试材料中充满了否定句，你通常无法改变这一点，但除此之外的一切内容都在你的掌控之中——包括解释、提示、引导和设置标签。只要有选择，我都会用肯定句来书写；如果无法避免，我会通过视觉强调来突出否定词，确保用户无法忽略。至于双重否定——比如“除非……否则不被允许”——我将其视为一种缺陷。
Short sentences are not dumbing down. There’s a reflex, especially when the subject is regulatory, to write in the register of the source material. Long clauses, stacked conditions, formal connectives. That register exists for legal 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 preparing for a professional qualification. 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. 短句并不等于降低智力门槛。人们有一种本能，尤其是在涉及法规内容时，倾向于模仿原始材料的语体——使用长从句、堆叠的条件和正式的连接词。那种语体是为了法律的严谨性而存在的，而非为了易读性。你完全可以在保持严谨的同时缩短句子：一句话只表达一个观点，将条件列出而非串联，让主语靠近动词。这并不是在简化内容。这些用户是正在准备职业资格考试的成年人，以居高临下的态度对待他们本身就是一种失败，而且他们察觉到这一点的时间比你想象的要快。目标是让语言变得透明，从而让难度完全回归到学科本身，这才是它该在的地方。
Translation is not the same as localization. Translating a question correctly and making it answerable 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 English term alongside it — because the test and the examiner will both be in English. A learner who only ever sees the translated term will meet the English one for the first time under exam conditions. 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 exam. 翻译不等于本地化。准确翻译一个问题和让问题变得可回答是两码事。某些专业术语在目标语言中可能没有对应词。诚实的做法通常是给出翻译的同时保留英文原词——因为考试和考官最终都是英文的。如果学习者只见过翻译后的术语，那么他们第一次见到英文原词时就是在考场上。这意味着有些内容必须刻意保持不翻译。判断哪些词该翻译、哪些不该翻译，属于领域判断而非语言决策，这部分工作无法外包给不了解考试内容的翻译人员。
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 learner must recognize anyway, where showing them is the content. 图标的作用往往不如你预期的那么大。图标看起来像是解决语言障碍的显而易见的方法，但实际上它们本身就是一种词汇，且深受文化背景影响。软盘图标对没见过软盘的人来说代表“保存”，而对没接触过这种惯例的人来说则毫无意义。图标真正有用的地方在于：强化你已经用文字写出的标签。它们失败的地方在于：试图取代文字。我将图标视为冗余而非压缩手段——唯一的例外是学习者必须识别的领域符号，在这种情况下，展示这些符号本身就是内容的一部分。
Time pressure multiplies everything. Every problem above gets worse under a clock, and the exam has one. A sentence that costs a fluent reader two seconds and a second-language reader eight is a rounding error in practice and a catastrophe across a full test. 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. 时间压力会放大一切问题。上述所有问题在计时器下都会变得更糟，而考试恰恰有时间限制。一个母语读者只需两秒、而第二语言读者需要八秒的句子，在实际操作中可能只是误差，但在整场考试中就是一场灾难。因此，我将阅读时间视为一种真正的预算。如果一个屏幕内容能让人一眼看懂而无需重读，那它就合格了。如果我的视线需要回看，那它就不合格——而且我的阅读能力还属于比较轻松的情况。
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. 不要让他们阅读任何非必要的内容。最高效的工作不是重写句子，而是删减屏幕。每一段界面文案都是用户以第二语言支付的“税款”。那些解释用户只需点两下就能发现的功能引导、针对可逆操作的确认弹窗、重复标签含义的工具提示——在英文环境下，这些只是轻微的杂乱，但在第二语言环境下，它们是毫无回报的成本。
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. 为什么这不仅仅对这一类用户重要？以上所有内容其实就是高质量的界面文案，只是被放大了而已。短句、肯定句式、实用的词汇、更少的屏幕——这些都不是为了非母语人士而做的特殊照顾。它们同样能帮助深夜十一点在手机上阅读的疲惫的母语使用者。为更困难的情况进行设计，会让简单的情况变得更好。它只是让那些设计缺陷变得无法忽视，而这正是其价值所在。