Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Reading 
Perhaps one of the most complex applications of visual processing, and the 
one most closely related to translation is the ability to read. Reading as an 
activity consists of several stages. Firstly, the visual pattern or appearance of 
the word is perceived. This physical image must be decoded by matching it 
against our own semiotic knowledge (signs such as letters and words) and 
then interpreted on the basis of syntactic and semantic analyses which oper-
ate on phrases or entire sentences (Dix 1998:22). 
When we read, our eyes move in a series of saccades. This means that 
the eyes do not move smoothly but rather in a stop-start manner. Each sac-
cade consists of a brief period of motion followed by a fixation (Card 
et al.
1983:50) which is when the eye is at rest and when perception occurs. 
Fixations account for 94% of time spent actively reading. The eye moves 
both forwards and backwards to read and re-read text. These backward 
movements are known as regressions and are more frequent when reading 
complicated or difficult texts. 
the quick brown fox 
jumps over the 
the lazy dog 
107 

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Understanding Users 
Generally speaking, the average adult can read approximately 250 words 
per minute. This speed means that it is unlikely that each letter is scanned 
and decoded in series. Indeed, according to Dix (1998:22) we can recognise 
certain familiar words by their shape just as quickly as we can recognise a 
single letter. One interesting effect of this is that it is very easy to destroy 
the visual clues which make whole words recognisable by shape. So for in-
stance, if we were to capitalise a word, we undo the familiarity of the 
word’s shape and consequently the word will have to be scanned and proc-
essed as a string of letters rather than as a single meaningful unit (
ibid.
). 
Take for example the word “intermediate”. Written like this we can rec-
ognise it almost instantly. But if we write it in uppercase like this 
INTERMEDIATE, it is not so immediately recognisable.