Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Understanding How We Read User Guides 
Before we can even contemplate improving the quality of user guides, it is 
essential to understand why and how users read them. As we discussed ear-
lier, the primary purpose of user guides is to educate users. However, users 
may have different learning strategies when it comes to software which af-
fect how they read the user guide: some may perform tasks as they read the 
user guide while others may read the user guide completely before starting 
to use the software. Others may quickly browse the user guide to find key 
information before learning the rest as they use the software. These differ-
s
cribe how users carry out their task in a specific context. 
There are several potential use cases for user guides. Coe (1996:138-140) 
provides a useful categorisation of these as part of an overall discussion of 
reading strategies. She identifies two primary types of reading strategy: 
read-
ing to learn 
and 
reading to perform actions
, corresponding to users’ desire 
to acquire declarative knowledge or procedural knowledge respectively. 
Users may also access a text in a number of ways: they may read a text se-
quentially or randomly. In addition to the general purpose of reading ex-
pressed by the type of strategy and the methods of accessing the text, Coe 
(
ibid.
) maintains that there are five goals of reading. These are closely re-
lated to the type of reading and they describe the method of reading chosen 
by the user in order to achieve the desired outcome. 
case the reader’s attention is focussed on the meaning of specific informa-
tion.
be either declarative or procedural and it can be either sequential or ran-
dom.
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goal and can be either sequential or random in nature.
Skimming
involves reading for the “gist” of a text. This is a declarative 
mation.