Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

particular situation, it therefore depends on that situation in order to have 
the correct meaning, relevance and importance. Thus, the text is part of the 
situation and so adding material or facts from the situation is perfectly ac-
ceptable because it is not so much adding but reallocating information. In 
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Theory in Technical Translation 21 
fact this is similar to what Kussmaul (1998:123) describes as “enlarging a 
scene”. In this case, the scene would be the situation and circumstances in 
which the sign is used, e.g. on an airfield. He does urge caution in this re-
spect because of the difficulty in definitively saying “how many and which 
kinds of elements can be added to a scene without getting into another 
scene that is no longer adequate as a translation”. So there is a limit to how 
much information we can make explicit from the scene but unfortunately, 
there are no hard and fast rules. 
Conversely, it is sometimes essential to remove information from a text. 
This can happen for several reasons: sometimes the information is legally 
inappropriate for a particular audience; the information does not apply to 
the target audience for technical reasons; or the information is meaningless 
for the target audience. 
Another example comes from a translation I carried out for the manufac-
turer of a satellite television receiver. The document consisted of a series of 
frequently asked questions relating to the receiver, its configuration and its 
operation. The document stated that users could find details of the frequen-
cies and polarities of various television channels in a range of German 
magazines, each of which was mentioned by name. At first glance this was a 
fairly innocuous sentence but in reality it was potentially problematic. 
Firstly, the magazines are not available outside Germany and even if they 
were, they would be in German and would be of no use to the reader. An 
alternative to listing the names of the magazines would be to do a little re-
search and replace the names with the names of similar English-language 
magazines which also provided the same information. A little above and 
beyond the call of duty perhaps, but it is the type of thing some translators 
would do as a matter of course for a customer. This, however, is not with-
out its problems either. With English being spoken in several countries, 
how do we know that the magazines we select will be available in places 
like Canada, the United States, Ireland, England, Australia and so on? The 
translation itself may end up in any number of these countries but the like-
lihood of a magazine being available in some or all of them is by no means 
assured. In this case, a more sensible solution would be to simply omit the 
names of the magazines and refer users to “your satellite listings magazine”.