Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Cognitive Processing 
So far we have examined ways in which we can describe the human cogni-
tive system and we have looked at the components of this system as well as 
some of their capabilities and limitations. We will now examine how these 
subsystems interact with each other and function together as a whole to 
make the human cognitive system what it is – an information processor.
This section looks at how and where we use this system, i.e. what we 
use our cognitive system to process as well as the actual mechanics involved 
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Understanding Users 
in using the system. For our purposes, this discussion will be restricted to 
how we tackle new information and tasks and how we learn. 
Cognitive Conscious and Cognitive Unconscious 
In his discussion of human cognitive processes, Raskin (2000:11ff ) distin-
guishes between the 
cognitive conscious 
and 
cognitive unconscious
. This 
distinction is necessary in order to explain the way in which humans actu-
ally go about processing information and, perhaps, to shed light on the 
limitations and anomalies of how we perform tasks. 
Human cognitive unconscious essentially refers to information which we 
are not consciously using or aware of at a given point in time. We can refer 
to the cognitive unconscious as those things we are only subconsciously 
aware of but which are not relevant to what we are currently doing (com-
pare this with the notion of relevance as espoused by Sperber & Wilson 
1986 and by Gutt 1991). Conversely, our cognitive conscious refers to in-
formation, tasks, etc. that we aare conscious of, i.e., that we are currently us-
ing.
Another way of looking at the difference between cognitive conscious 
and cognitive unconscious is that when we access and process information 
we are transferring it from our unconscious to our conscious. This transfer 
of information can be triggered by a stimulus, such as reading a sentence, or 
by an act of volition. For the purposes of this study, we can say that cogni-
tive conscious broadly correlates to our everyday notion of attention. 
Attention 
As we mentioned earlier, our sensory system is under a constant barrage of 
information and input. We mentioned that in order to function effectively 
and avoid sensory information “overload” it is essential that we be able to 
filter and group information in order to extract and absorb what is immedi-
ately of relevance to us. But why is this necessary? The notion of avoiding 
overload is true to a certain extent but the underlying principle is that of at-
tention, or to quote Preece (1994:100), selective attention. 
Coe (1996:9) describes attention, or rather attentive processing, as proc-
esses that involve cognitive functions such as learning, memory and under-
standing. 
Attentive 
processes involve higher cognitive functions. This is in 
contrast to 
preattentive
processes which do not involve cognitive processing 
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Cognitive Processing
and which are primarily a function of sensory input (
ibid.
). So we can see 
that attention is similar to, if not the same as, Raskin’s concept of cognitive 
consciousness or information that is currently being processed in STM.