Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation
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byrne jody technical translation usability strategies for tr
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- Latent and Introduced Iconic Linkage
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2a: If you want to open a file, click Open.
2b: The Close button must be pressed when you want to close a file. Table 2: Example of Two Sentences which do not have Parallel Structures Parallelism is not just important in avoiding grammatical and compre- hension problems, it is also very useful in reinforcing ideas and learning. The grammatical symmetry of parallelisms helps readers remember informa- tion more easily (White 1996:183). 165 Where my definition of IL differs from both House’s definition and parallelism is that parallelism and House’s definition deal with localised in- stances of structural similarity. Both deal with isolated pieces of text at what technical writers call “parallelism” (see Chapter 2). Parallelism is Usability Engineering strategy which is used throughout a text. Indeed, instances of IL can be separated by large stretches of text. In addition, rather than being restricted to individual phrases or sentences, IL can manifest itself in entire paragraphs or longer stretches of text. In contrast to House’s definition, IL is actively introduced into a text, rather than being a naturally occurring feature of a text, i.e. a feature of the text when it was ffirst produced. Latent and Introduced Iconic Linkage Before embarking on a more detailed discussion of Iconic Linkage, it is im- portant to differentiate between the two principal types of Iconic Linkage: Latent and Introduced . Latent Iconic Linkage refers to isomorphic, semantically identical sen- tences which occur “naturally” in a source text. These instances of Iconic Linkage form part of the text as it was originally written. Frequently, such instances of Iconic Linkage are destroyed during subsequent processes such as editing or translation. This can occur for a variety of reasons. With re- gard to the translation process, translators may not always remember how they dealt with a previous instance of a sentence and will provide a slightly different rendering. While this problem may be lessened though the use of translation memory (TM) tools such as Trados Translator’s Workbench or Atril Déjà vu , not all translators have access to such tools. Another reason for the loss of latent Iconic Linkage both during translation and during edit- ing is that repetition can be regarded as anathema to good writing. While this may be the case with creative and other forms of writing, repetition (or consistency) is actually desirable in technical documents in general and user guides specifically. As such, all instances of latent Iconic Linkage represent naturally occurring “quality components” within the text and should be maintained during translation and editing. Introduced Iconic Linkage refers to instances of Iconic Linkage which are added to a text during editing or translation . If for example, two or more non-isomorphic but semantically identical sentences (or parts of sen- tences) are encountered by an editor or translator, using the same target text construction to render each source sentence will introduce Iconic Linkage into the text. 166 particular locations, e.g. a sentence or list. Instead, IL as used here is an active |
