Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Technical Communication 
nication to help translators understand the environment in which technical 
documents are produced as well as the factors and constraints affecting 
them. The reason for this is that these same factors and constraints also af-
fect the translation of these texts to a large extent. In this chapter we will 
also outline the kinds of documents produced and discuss the interrelation-
ships between translation and technical writing. We will then focus on in-
structional documents in general and software user guides in particular.
Before proceeding it is worth pointing out that in the context of techni-
cal documentation, several terms are used to describe what is essentially the 
same thing. Thus, it is not uncommon to see the terms “user guide”, 
“user’s guide”, “manual” etc. in use. As Van Laan and Julian (2001:57) 
point out, the choice of which word to use depends on the particular com-
onymous. Having said that, they ccan be different if we need them to be 
the purposes of this book, we will refer solely to user guides. 
In contrast to other types of writing such as “medical writing”, “creative 
writing” or “legal writing”, the field of technical writing, like technical 
translation, is rather ambiguous in many regards. It is clear that a medical 
writer writes about medicine and so on but what do technical writers write 
about? Technical information? This is far too vague to provide any real an-
swers. White (1996:4) defines technical writing as “communicating… spe-
cialised information in any field (particularly industry), read by technicians, 
technical managers, owner-operators of machines, and scientific researchers 
to perform a certain task”. White continues by saying that technical writing 
is “a means to an end rather than as an end in itself”. What makes texts 
technical is their “utilitarian, specialized focus” (White 1996:12). Technical 
writing is a form of translation whereby the “abstract-theoretical” is trans-
formed into the “concrete-actual”. 
However, this definition only goes part of the way towards explaining 
what technical writing is. Indeed, in the hundreds of years that technical 
47
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of technical commu-
pany, organisation or preferences of the writer and they are largely 
syn
dif ferent so picking a term and using it consistently is essential. For 

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Technical Communication 
writing proper has been practised, the entire area has grown so drastically 
that the term technical writing no longer seems able to contain the wide 
range of activities it encompasses. 
The National Writers’ Union (NWU) in the United States maintains 
that there are at least three different types of writing encompassed by the 
general term “technical writing” (1998). These areas are as follows: