Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Functionalism 
Unfortunately for the professional translator, the categories, levels and clas-
sifications of equivalence described above, while helping us to pick through 
a translation to see how it ticks, do not really help with the actual process of 
translation. 
In an attempt to escape the restrictive and often limited approaches to 
translation based on theories of equivalence, translation theorists such as 
Reiss (1971) and House (1981) changed the focus from being entirely 
source-based to include some aspects of the target text. To be precise, their 
attention centred on the function of the target text. Such an approach 
moves away from the bottom-up linguistic approaches of equivalence-based 
theories and instead involves pragmatic and situational aspects of the transla-
tion process. This is indeed an improvement in that it goes at least some 
way towards acknowledging the fact that texts are written and translated for 
a reason. However, functionalist based theories do not entirely forsake the 
source text. Rather they are a hybrid approach which considers both the 
source and the target texts. 
Nevertheless, functionalism as a general ideology based on extralinguis-
tic, pragmatic and communicative factors of translation is nothing new. 
Even in 1964, Nida’s notion of dynamic equivalence called for the repro-
duction of the effect (or function) of the source text in the target text 
through equivalence of extralinguistic communicative effect. This was al-
ready hinting at functionalism as we later came to know it. 
In 1971, Reiss included the element of text function in her model of 
translation criticism. While Reiss’ work is often regarded as highly conser-
vative and dated, it did mark a turning point in the way scholars looked at 
translation, particularly in Germany. Her model, while being overwhelm-
ingly equivalence-based, also includes the functional relationship between 
the source and target texts. According to Reiss, the ideal translation is one 
where optimum equivalence is achieved as regards the conceptual content, 
linguistic form and communicative function. This essentially means that, 
taking into account the linguistic and situational context, the linguistic and 
stylistic factors as well as the author’s intentions (even though this in itself is 
a persistent source of debate), the target text should have the same “value” 
as the source text. One of the problems, however, with this approach to 
the function of translations is that it cannot deal with instances of translation 
where the function of the target text is different to that of the source. To 
circumvent this problem, Reiss defines such instances as 
“Übertragungen” 
(1971:105) or transfers. Thus, translations where the function changes are 
not, she maintains, ‘real’ translations, but rather adaptations. 

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32 Technical Translation 
House (1981) also adopts a functionalist approach and states that it is 
“undeniably true that a translation should produce equivalent responses” 
(1981:9) and it is on this basis that she maintains that the ultimate goal of a 
translation is to achieve the same function in the target text as that in the 
source text. She defines two types of translation: 
covert
and 
overt
. A covert 
translation is one where the text function is preserved and the reader is not 
aware that the text is a translation. An overt translation, on the other hand, 
does not maintain the text function of the original and the readers are 
somehow aware that it is a translation and not the original language text. In 
order to determine whether functional equivalence has been achieved, 
Houses proposes that the source text be analysed first so that the target text 
can be compared against it. 
Like Reiss, this approach escapes the restrictive, purely linguistic criteria 
of traditional equivalence-based models by including certain pragmatic and 
extralinguistic factors but they both fail to take into instances where it is ei-
ther not always possible or not desirable to maintain the same function in 
both texts (cf. Kade 1977:33; Nord 1997:9) to accommodate audience ex-
pectations for the text genre (cf. Gerzymisch-Arbogast 1993:33-34). A 
prime example of this comes in the analysis of a tourist brochure by House 
(1981:118ff). House criticises the translator for not preserving the apparent 
flattery provided by the German text’s lack of explanation for certain cul-
turally-specific items. She regards this, not so much as an error, but more as 
proof that the translation was not really a translation, but rather an adapta-
tion. Gutt (1991:50) asks the question of what happens if flattery is not so-
cially acceptable in the target culture. Can the translation really be criticised 
for conforming to the social norms and customs of the target audience? Af-
ter all, preserving individual functions within a translation may ultimately 
make the translation as a whole functionally non-equivalent. It could be ar-
gued that purposely changing the function in the target text is actually an 
important way of hiding any clues as to the text’s true origins in the source 
language, something which is central to the notion of a covert translation.
According to House texts where the function is not maintained are 
overt 
(1977:194) and not real translations because they draw attention to the fact 
that they are translations. Reiss claims that a target text where the function 
of the source text is not maintained is a 
transfer
and dismisses them as 
something other than “real” translations. So for instance, if a German user 
guide is intended to 
instruct
while an English user guide is intended to 
ex-
plain
, a translation between these two languages will not be a translation 
but rather an adaptation, even though the target text can be regarded as a 
translation in every other sense. 

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Theory in Technical Translation 33 
What is more - as is the case with traditional equivalence-based ap-
proaches - any attempt at translation based on this approach is constrained 
by the need to define the target text in terms of how closely it reflects the 
source text on a variety of levels. This is problematic in that the target text 
is not regarded as an independent, autonomous text - and this is how trans-
lations are regarded by the target audience, at least in a professional context. 
Since Reiss’s model, for example, focuses on the linguistic means the
source 
language uses to express text function, the wording of the source text be-
comes the yardstick for judging the appropriateness of the linguistic means 
employed in the target text (Lauscher 2000:155). But because text function 
is expressed using different linguistic means or writing strategies in different 
languages, reflecting the source text linguistic features will result in unusual 
and possibly unacceptable target texts.
There are other problems with this type of approach, however. Nord 
(1991:23) argues that the function of the target text cannot be “arrived at 
automatically from an analysis of the source text”. Instead, it needs to be 
defined pragmatically by the purpose of the intercultural communication. 
Fawcett (1997:107) maintains that there is no need to link text function and 
translation strategy. He maintains that just because it is possible to identify 
the function of a text, there is no “logical or translation-scientific impera-
tive” on a translator to shape and govern translation decisions on the basis 
of the function. Besides, if technical texts are translated with a specific 
communicative situation in mind, surely this situation should form an inte-
gral part of the translation process and define the end result. In any case, us-
ing the source text as the sole means for determining the function of the 
source text and subsequently the target text is a risky business. This is pri-
marily because such an approach presupposes a uniformity of skill and care 
achieve. 
Technical translators also encounter the problem that it is not always ap-
parent from the text what type of text it is, let alone what the actual pur-
pose is. This can be for a variety of reasons: the text sent to the translator 
may be pre-translated or tagged using a translation memory (TM) tool and 
the visual clues indicating text type may be missing making the linguistic 
clues more difficult to spot; or web pages may be cut and pasted into a 
word processor file. In other cases, the file to be translated may be designed 
to serve as the source document for a single-source multi-channel publish-
ing system where the same text is used to provide content for a range of 
texts such as manuals, advertising materials, newsletters, technical documen-
tation, web pages, presentations, etc. In such cases, the translator cannot 
on the part of the original author in the way the text is written (thereby 
encoding the text function within it) which is impossible to quantify or 

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34 Technical Translation 
possibly know what the ultimate function of the translated text will be 
unless some form of extratextual information is available.