Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

The Human Cognitive System 
If we take a basic view, computers are information processing systems. In-
formation, or data, is manipulated, created, modified, accessed and stored. 
Similarly, the human mind can also be regarded as an information process-
ing system. As such, the broad model of a computer can be used as an anal-
ogy for describing the human information processor (Card 
et al.
1983:24; 
Downton 1991:20). We can draw several comparisons between the two 
contexts in that they can both be said to consist of memory, processors, in-
terconnections, rules etc. However, such an approach can only be used for 
illustrative purposes as the structure of a computer does not necessarily re-
flect the structure of the brain. Indeed, there is still some debate about 
whether certain components of the mind are distinct physical locations or 
merely different functions of the same physical location (Card 
et al.
1983:23,36; Dix 1998:27; Faulkner 1998:33-34). Raskin (2000:12) warns 
against using current technology as figurative models because such models 
rapidly become outdated and quaint. Nevertheless, using computers as an 
illustrative model allows us to conveniently examine the human mind as a 
series of subsystems. If we return to the idea of a computer we can see on a 
very basic level that: 
information is input into the computer 
the information is processed, and 
an appropriate response or output is prepared
Applying this scheme to humans we can divide the human mind into the 
following subsystems (see Card 
et al.
1983:24; Downton 1991:20): 
the perceptual/sensory system 
the cognitive system 
the motor system 
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The Human Cognitive System
For our purposes here it is convenient to discuss the perceptual and motor 
systems together as they are similar to the basic notion of a computer’s in-
put/output system. This model, however, omits a fundamental factor 
common to both computers and humans: information is stored and ac-
cessed. And so, to make the model more accurate in terms of functions we 
need to incorporate memory into it. We can use the following components 
to examine the human system (see Dix 1998:12): 
input / output 
memory 
processing