Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Strong and Weak Verbs 
The differentiation between strong and weak verbs can be quite subjective 
and is rather elusive. It would, perhaps, be easier to define the two terms 
using a number of examples of strong and weak verbs. Mancuso (1990:174) 
suggests that strong verbs might include 
weld
,
singe
,
salivate
,
bulldoze
and 
inject
. Weak verbs, he continues, include the various forms of the verb 
to 
be
and the verbs 
do
,
make
,
provide
and 
include
. Strong verbs, he maintains 
verbs say little, if anything and result in the reader having to spend more 
time “deciphering meaning rather than reading it” (
ibid.
).
From the examples given below, we can see that strong verbs are those 
that actually reflect the function or action in question. The following sen-
tence is rewritten to illustrate examples of strong and weak verbs: 
The function of the hard disk is to allow you to store data. 
The benefit of using strong verbs is that it allows readers to understand in-
formation more quickly. Additionally, as can be seen in above example, 
strong verbs allow for more concise constructions. 
just as unhelpful as weak verbs in that they obscure meaning and add to the 
workload of readers. An example of this would be as follows: 
The setup program results in an update of the registry. 
90
The hard disk stores data. 
Nominalisations, i.e. verbs that have been transformed into nouns, are 
create images; they add a sense of action to a text. On the other hand, weak 
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Software User Guides & Quality
If we remove the nominalization, we get the following: 
The setup program updates the registry.