Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

A Definition of Iconic Linkage 
Iconic Linkage (IL) refers to the use of isomorphic constructions to express 
what is, essentially, the same information. So, where the same information 
is expressed more than once in a text, the exact same textual formulation or 
construction is used. This is in contrast to the use of slightly different for-
mulations which is employed in order to prevent what is commonly seen as 
repetition. 
More specifically, in the case of translated texts, IL is the repetition or re-
use of target language translations for source language sentences which have 
the same meaning but different surface properties. In other words, sentences 
which are semantically identical but which are non-isomorphic are trans-
lated using the same target language sentence or construction.
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Iconic Linkage
Origins of Iconic Linkage 
The term Iconic Linkage was coined by House (1981:55) to refer to in-
stances of structural similarity in adjacent sentences. She defines IL as occur-
ring when two or more adjacent sentences in a text “cohere because they 
are, at the surface level, isomorphic”. This phenomenon is quite similar to 
a phenomenon which is widely recognised as a desirable feature of sentence 
structure (D’Agenais & Carruthers 1985:104; Mancuso 1990:231; White 
1996:182). Essentially, parallelism means that parts of a sentence which are 
similar, or parallel, in meaning should be parallel in structure.
Parallel constructions can also be described as instances where two or 
more groups of words share the same pattern (White 1996:182). Thus, we 
can see that parallelism can occur on both a sentence level and on a sub-
sentence level. The following sentences 1a and 1b illustrate parallelism. 
1a: If you want to open a file, click Open. 
1b: If you want to close a file, click Close. 
Table 1: Example of parallelism between two sentences 
When there is a lack of parallelism (for example in 2a and 2b) some of the 
grammatical elements in a sentence do not balance with the other elements 
in the sentence or another sentence. Consequently, the clarity and readabil-
ity of a section of text are adversely affected. What makes this undesirable, 
apart from potential grammatical errors, is that it distracts the reader and 
prevents the message from being read quickly and clearly (Mancuso 
1990:232).