Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Deductive Reasoning 
Deductive reasoning attempts to arrive at logical conclusions on the basis of 
a set of explicit premises. With this type of reasoning, we seek to derive 
particular conclusions from general truths which we know or believe to be 
true (Coe 1996:110).
As a whole, reasoning is based largely on the study of formal logic (Ellis 
& Hunt 1993:291) and involves reaching conclusions based on general as-
sumptions (
ibid.
). However, there a number of points that must be remem-
bered here. Firstly, humans do not always reason logically (Ellis & Hunt 
1993:295; Hill 1995:20). Secondly, a conclusion may be correct from a 
purely logical point of view, but it may have no relation whatsoever to the 
real world or how we view it. An example of this would be the following: 
If the sun is shining, it is night time. 
The sun is shining. 
Therefore it is night time. 
We can see from this example that a logically correct deduction is not nec-
essarily true in terms of the real world. 
Inductive Reasoning 
Inductive reasoning is the process of generalising information from specific 
cases we have seen and then applying this general knowledge to cases we 
have not seen. For example, we can generalise from our past experiences 
that all birds have beaks because every bird we have seen had a beak. How-
ever, this method is unreliable in the sense that assumptions made using this 
method cannot be proved to be true – they can only be proved to be false. 
This is because we cannot possibly see every bird that ever lived or will 
live. And so there is a risk – theoretically, at least - that the next bird we see 
may not have a beak. However, each bird we see that 
does
have a beak 
serves as a positive instance which reinforces our generalisation.
To put this in context, let us assume we say all cars have four wheels. 
Every car we have ever seen has had four wheels. Each one of the many 
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Understanding Users 
cars we saw simply served to reinforce this generalisation until one day we 
see a 
Robin Reliant 
which has only three wheels. This challenges our belief 
that all cars have three wheels. However, the fact that we have seen so 
many examples of four-wheeled cars means that while our generalisation 
has been proved to be false, we are unlikely to discard it because cars almost 
always have four wheels. We may modify this generalisation to say that cars 
have three or four wheels but usually four. This illustrates the iterative na-
ture of reasoning whereby we derive, apply and modify general truths (Coe 
1996:110). 
In spite of the unreliability of inductive reasoning, it serves as a useful 
method for maintaining information for general purposes and allowing us 
to make fairly stable generalisations about the world.