Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Conclusions 
Building upon the insight into cognition provided in Chapter 3, this chap-
ter examined usability from the point of view of interfaces. In the context 
of human-computer interaction, an interface can be defined as anything 
that acts as an intermediary between a user and the inner workings and 
processes of a computer or piece of software. Having described usability in 
Chapter 2 as ensuring that an interface takes into account the cognitive 
abilities and limitations of humans, this chapter turned the notion of usabil-
ity into a series of definite design goals and objectives which ensure users 
can work effectively, efficiently and with ease. These goals codify those as-
pects of human cognition where active strategies can be implemented to 
improve the interaction. 
Cognetics, or cognitive engineering, was introduced as a discipline 
where interfaces are engineered or designed to capitalise on human abilities 
and to compensate for human limitations. The first step in any attempt to 
improve the usability of a user guide is to set goals. With a clear under-
standing of what it is we need to achieve when producing user guides, the 
next step was to establish how to actually improve the interface. The chap-
ter then discussed the concepts of principles, guidelines and rules and pro-
vided examples of each of these concepts. 
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Usability Engineering 
Iconic Linkage (IL) was then introduced as one possible guideline which 
allows translators to improve the usability of a user guide. We saw that IL 
can occur naturally within a text (i.e. when the text is first produced) or it 
can be actively introduced into a text during the translation process. 
We also looked at the extent to which partial or full IL can occur be-
tween two or more sentences. Where only parts of the information payload 
in sentences are matched and this information is phrased identically, the IL 
is said to be