Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Usability Means Focussing On Users 
In order to make a usable product it is vital to understand real users. People 
such as managers and developers do not represent real users. 
People Use Products to be Productive 
Software products are tools which people use in order to do something else. 
People judge the product on the basis of the time it takes them to do some-
thing, the number of steps they have to perform and how successful they 
are in doing the task. The aim is to make products so easy to use that users 
can perform their tasks more quickly. 
Users Are Busy 
The usability of products is gauged by users in terms of how quickly they 
can get the product to do something. A product may have precisely the 
functionality a user needs to perform a task but if the function cannot be 
accessed or used within the time the user is prepared to devote to the task, 
it will be useless. This idea is virtually identical to Landauer’s distinction be-
tween usefulness and usability discussed above. 
Users Decide How Usable a Product Is 
Regardless of how well developers, managers or marketing people think 
something is designed, the ultimate judge of usability is the users them-
selves. If the effort needed to perform a task outweighs the benefit, users 
will regard the product as unusable. 
The Scope of Usability 
In previous paragraphs we referred to usability in terms of its relationship to 
“products” or as “systems” and the product’s relationship to users. When 
we speak of users and usability we are actually referring to the interactions 
between users and products or systems. This is indeed convenient but when 
we speak of products or systems we are referring to a collective of various 
different components all of which make up the whole that is the software 
system. Such components include hardware, software, menus, icons, mes-
sages, user guides, quick reference guides, online help and training. All of 
these have a bearing on usability and conversely, the usability of each of 
these factors affects the usability of the system as a whole. This synergy be-
tween the components is echoed by Dumas & Redish (1999:6) who state 
that “changes in technology have blurred the lines among these product 
pieces, so that it is no longer useful to think of them as separate entities”. As 
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Understanding Users 
such, a user guide that is less than satisfactory from a user’s point of view 
will adversely affect the overall usability of the system because user guides 
form a core part of the system. In the following section, we will examine 
users from the point of view of those cognitive processes and abilities which 
affect the way users use user guides.