Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Install the necessary drivers on the PC. 
Assessing User Guide Quality 
The evaluation of user guides takes place on a number of levels. While it 
would be tempting just to test a user guide to see that it accurately reflects 
the software, such an approach would provide only a partial picture. As we 
have seen in preceding sections, the design and layout of a user guide as 
well as the way it is written are important factors in producing a user guide. 
In the following sections we will examine several methods for assessing user 
guides. 
Readability 
In addition to ensuring that writing is clear, consistent and concise, read-
ability testing also indicates whether the text is at the correct level for the 
intended audience. There are numerous methods for measuring readability 
including the 
Flesch Readability Test
, the 
Lensear Write Formula
, the 
Fog 
Index
, 
Fry’s Readability Graph 
and the 
Clear River Test
.
Most of these methods involve selecting a sample of text between 100-
200 words in length. Each of the methods mentioned above express read-
ability in terms of the proportion of various features such as syllables, 
monosyllabic words etc., average sentence length etc. Methods such as the 
Fog Index regard words with more than three syllables as difficult while 
words with less than three syllables are regarded as easy . 
The Flesch Readability Test developed by Rudolph Flesch examines 
readability as a relationship between the average sentence length and the 
average word length; the shorter the sentence and the shorter the words, 
the more readable the text. The readability of a text is presented using a 
scale of 0 to 100; the higher the score, the easier the text is to read 
(D’Agenais & Carruthers 1985:113). 
The Fog Index identifies easy words in a text, i.e. words with one or 
two syllables, and calculates readability as a function of the average sentence 
length and the percentage of hard words, i.e. three or more syllables. 
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Assessing User Guide Quality
Readability is then expressed in terms of the number of years schooling 
needed to read the text with ease. Similarly, the Lensear Write Formula 
calculates readability on the basis of the proportion of monosyllabic words 
in a text using the following formula: 
Figure 5: Lensear Write Formula 
Using the Lensear Write Formula, a score of 70-80 points is regarded as 
ideal for user guides (D’Agenais & Carruthers 1985:114). 
terms of the level of schooling needed in order to read a text with ease. 
Taking a sample of 100 words, it calculates the average number of syllables 
per sentence and the number of sentences per 100 words before expressing 
readability as a function of the two. 
Figure 6: Fog Index Formula 
The Clear River Test combines several of the features of the preceding 
methods and analyses readability in terms of the number of words per sen-
tence, per paragraph, per punctuational pause and the number of syllables 
per 100 words. 
These tests can prove very useful in providing an overview of how effec-
tive a user guide is in terms of readability but they do not explain why a 
user guide is ineffective despite being readable. Is the text poor because of 
the register used? Does it contain too much jargon? Are concepts not ex-
plained clearly? Does the text contain ungrammatical constructions? Indeed, 
George Klare, a leading academic in the field of readability evaluation for-
mulae concedes that readability assessments are of limited use in assessing 
computer documentation and that in some cases, such methods were not 
even designed for use on such texts (Klare 2000:2-3). It is clear that in or-
der to pinpoint precisely what errors contribute to a text’s under-
performance, we need to find a more comprehensive evaluation method.