Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Scanning
is another declarative method intended to find specific infor-
Searching
is a declarative method which is similar to scanning but in this 
Receptive
refers to reading to fully understand information in a text. It can 
Critical
refers to reading for evaluation purposes. A sequential method 
that is either declarative or procedural.
-
ent circumstances are known as 
scenarios of use 
or 
use cases
and they de

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Usability Engineering 
Assumptions about Reading User Guides 
For our purpose, we will presume that the use case involves users reading 
the text to perform some task, i.e. they are looking for procedural informa-
tion. Novice users are, after all, more interested in how to do something 
(Redish 1988) rather than acquiring a deep theoretical understanding of the 
underlying principles. We will also assume that users will access information 
sequentially, at least within a section. Thus, while users may not read every 
section in sequence, they will at least proceed through each section in the 
intended order. This is because some readers may, for whatever reason, skip 
certain sections usually because they may already know some of the infor-
mation presented or because the information in a section is not immediately 
relevant to them. Finally, we will assume that the reading goal is receptive 
and that users want to understand the tasks they are performing. 
Having placed the user guide and the user in a specific use case, we need 
to examine in greater detail the task of reading. Fortunately, a lot of infor-
mation is already known about the processes involved in reading so we are 
not forced to start entirely from scratch. Coe (1996:134-135) provides a 
useful and reasonably detailed summary of the cognitive processes of read-
ing which is based on the following headings: 
1. Perceive visual data 
2. Recognise words and letters or learn new words 
3. Understand the relationship of words to the entire passage 
4. Relate the information to a body of knowledge 
5. Encode the information 
6. Retrieve the information 
7. Communicate the information 
In the particular use case we have specified for this task analysis, only Stages 
1 to 6 are directly applicable because we are using the information immedi-
ately in order to perform a task. We are not communicating this informa-
Concentrating, instead, on Stages 1 to 6, we can say that in S
Stage 1, per-
ceiving information requires the physiological detection of physical stimuli. 
This information is then subjected to pre-attentive processing to group the 
physical marks on the page into shapes which may have a meaning for us. 
In S
Stage 2, we take these shapes and group them into letters and words. Us-
ing a combination of pattern matching techniques (prototype matching, 
template matching, distinctive features) we match these words with lexical 
information in long-term memory (LTM). This process identifies the 
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tion to anyone else although Coe maintains that Stage 7 
can
involve 
communicating the information to oneself. 

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Understanding How We Read User Guides
shapes as words the meanings of which we may or may not have in seman-
tic memory. Where we do not have semantic information associated with 
the words, procedural memory is activated to provide us with a way of 
finding out what the unrecognised or new words mean. Such procedures 
might include how to use a dictionary etc. Once we have located the 
meaning of the word, we store it in LTM for later use or in short-term 
memory (STM) for immediate use. 
Once we have recognised and identified all of the words, S
Stage 3 in-
volves relating these words to each other and with the rest of the sentence, 
paragraph or text. This requires the retrieval of semantic information for 
each word and the reconciliation of the various meanings for each one 
within the context of the meanings of other words. We then chunk this in-
formation and combine each chunk with additional chunks. Once we un-
derstand the text or passage, we then relate the information it contains to 
what we already know about the subject. In S
Stage 4, we may create new 
schemes or modify existing ones. This information is then incorporated into 
our existing knowledge base which is stored in LTM. 
In S
Stage 5, we encode the information in order to integrate it into new 
or modified schemes. This takes place in STM and the information is en-
coded as either procedural or declarative information. Ultimately, it is 
stored in LTM with varying degrees of success. 
In S
Stage 6, we retrieve information from LTM. In our specified use case, 
this would be necessary if, at a certain point in reading the user guide, there 
These stages govern the cognitive processes of reading in general. There 
are, however, certain additional factors which distinguish reading in general 
from reading a user guide to do something. To understand this, consider 
the following. Once we have performed the processes mentioned above, 
we are in a position where we have information either in STM or in LTM. 
The question now arises as to how we are going to use this information. If 
we are reading to perform a task, our first problem is to decide whether we 
have sufficient information available to perform the task. As mentioned in 
Stage 6 above, we may not have all of the information necessary, in which 
case the information is stored in STM or LTM and we continue reading 
until we find the required information. Of course there may be cases where 
readers may not realise that they do not have all of the information neces-
sary to perform a task but this represents a digression from the procedure 
outlined above. 
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was insufficient information available to perform a task. Consequently,
the information is either maintained briefly in STM or placed in LTM until 
the remaining information which is needed becomes available. 

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Usability Engineering 
If we do have all of the information needed, we have to locate the in-
formation in LTM. Providing this is completed successfully, we then decide 
how to perform the task. The question arises as to whether the task can be 
performed (a) at once, or (b) do we need to divide it into subtasks. If the 
answer is (a), we perform the task, ensure that we have been successful and 
continue reading. If the answer is (b), we divide the task into subtasks, per-
form each one (if possible) and in sequence and then continue reading.