Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Ecological Approaches 
This approach states that perception is a direct process whereby we detect 
information rather than create or interpret it. The ecological approach is 
not concerned with how we understand or recognise situations or scenes 
but rather what we need to know about a situation and how we go about 
finding it in our environment. This approach involves us actively exploring 
our surroundings and engaging in activities that allow us to find the neces-
sary information. 
Constructivist Approaches 
The constructivist approach, on the other hand, maintains that visual per-
ception is not just a direct representation of what we see but rather a model 
of our surroundings which is modified, transformed, enhanced and filtered 
using our knowledge, experience, expectations and memories. This ap-
proach sees perception as a process whereby what we see is compared 
against our experience of the world and an interpretation is constructed. 
What is more, by comparing what we detect from our surroundings against 
111 
im

---

Understanding Users 
what we know, we can deal with a wide variety of situations and, if neces-
sary, adapt to new situations and modify existing knowledge.
Piaget’s concept of schemes (Piaget & Inhelder 1969:4; Hill 1995:15; 
Ginsburg & Opper 1988:20-22) is a useful tool in understanding this. 
When people are presented with new tasks or situations, they bring with 
them a set of existing ideas, methods and knowledge (known as a scheme) 
which they will use to tackle the task. However, if this scheme is not ade-
quate for the task, they will modify this scheme in order to incorporate new 
knowledge, methods or approaches. Take, for example, the driver of a car. 
Driving a car requires a set of knowledge such as understanding gears, using 
the pedals, starting the engine, stopping distances, traffic regulations, ma-
noeuvring the vehicle, etc. Now let us imagine that this person wants to 
drive an articulated truck. The knowledge of driving a car is only partly 
useful – the rules of the road still apply as does the knowledge of using 
gears. But the knowledge of manoeuvring, braking distances etc. is different 
for trucks and will have to be modified if the driver is to successfully drive 
the truck. Schemes are also referred to as perceptual sets (Coe 1996:16).