Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Reasoning & Problem-Solving 
In the preceding discussion of automaticity and simultaneous tasks, we con-
centrated on the fundamental cognitive functions involved, namely atten-
tion and selection. We saw that with practice, our knowledge about how to 
perform tasks becomes automated and requires less cognitive effort. How-
ever, this discussion omitted a crucial fact: we do not necessarily have the 
skill and procedural knowledge needed to perform these tasks from the out-
set.
know that procedural knowledge is basically knowledge about how to per-
form tasks. But what happens when we encounter a task for the very first 
time? Having never been confronted with it, we do not have a procedure 
for achieving our goal. This is what is termed in cognitive psychology as a 
problem. Coe (1996:99) defines a problem as “a goal for which we have no 
attainment strategy”.
As Anderson (2000:240) notes, human cognition always takes place with 
a view to achieving goals and removing the obstacles that prevent the 
achievement of goals. So in a sense, virtually all human activity is either 
problem-solving or originated in problem-solving. Anderson (2000:241) 
continues to say that there is a tendency to use the term “problem” only for 
“original difficult episodes” but in reality, all procedural knowledge stems 
from the resolution of problems. The fact that some tasks become auto-
mated does not mean they are not responses to problems. 
Reasoning
While problem-solving revolves around finding strategies for dealing with 
new tasks or experiences, it depends on our ability to reason, i.e. how we 
make use of existing knowledge to draw conclusions or infer something 
from either implicit or explicit premises. Reasoning is a cognitive process 
whereby we reach a conclusion and then determine whether it is valid or 
138
Referring back to the discussion of procedural knowledge on page 120, we 

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Reasoning & Problem-Solving
invalid by applying certain logical criteria (Dix 1998:38; Coe 1996:109; 
Ellis & Hunt 1993:290-291). There are three types of reasoning: 
deductive
,
inductive
and 
abductive
.