Language Barriers

In my continued effort toward lifelong learning, I have been studying for the last paper required for my ITIL 4 Masters. While taking the mock exams and subsequently the actual exam, I found myself struggling with the language used in the exams. Often times the word salad requires a stop in the normal thought process and an in-depth focus on what they're actually trying to say. With only subtle cues and deceptively similar answers, I struggled with several of the questions and I'm a native English speaker! If I find the word salad challenging, what about those whose native language isn't English? In this particular exam they had some language options but if your language option isn't available, you only get an additional 30 minutes. Is the exam really testing the subject matter or how well you can comprehend the language? By making questions which challenge interpretation skills mixed with the subject matter, is it really a test of the subject or a test of your English language competency? and thereby setting up a demographic to fail?

Which leads me rather clumsily into this....

As a tourist in a foreign country, how often have you observed people trying to communicate with the locals and they hit a language barrier and resort to:

1. Speaking slower: as if magically this will allow the recipient to understand
2. Raise their voice: somehow volume helps?

How many times does this occur and we (collective) equate the intelligence of the person with their ability to communicate with us?

How would we feel if the same thought went through the mind of the person we were trying to communicate with?

Many "non-native English speakers" have multiple language capabilities, many of my colleagues speak 2-3 languages. [By this algorithm my intelligence just took a big hit.] Many of the smartest people I know struggle with English grammar as their native language doesn't follow the same rules. I see the same issue appear in google translate which gives the word to word translation without interpretation of the grammar, the output sentence appears unstructured and confused. If google can't get it right, it's obviously not an easy task.

We surely can not and should not measure intelligence / capability by language proficiency, but then why do we seemingly create artificial hurdles with word salad exams? (see how I brought that back?)

Time to listen more and speak less, look beyond our preconceived notions of intelligence linked to language and institutionally, remove barriers that do the same. Thoughts?