Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

particular thing (Preece 1994:101). This claim may seem less than credible 
or quite simply impossible. After all, what about people who can continue a 
conversation while they are driving? The answer is simple, although per-
haps not obvious. 
Attention & Selection 
When discussing the fact that attention can be either voluntary or involun-
tary, Preece (1994:101) refers to competing stimuli “grabbing our atten-
tion”. Herein lies the explanation for the apparent existence of multiple loci 
of attention. Instead of being able to focus on multiple tasks, our locus of 
attention switches from one task to another. Raskin (2000:24) also ac-
knowledges this point. When describing how events can trigger conscious 
attention, he stresses the point that we have not gained an additional locus 
of attention but rather our locus of attention has been shifted elsewhere (see 
also Card 
et al. 
1983:42). Preece (1994:105) later refers to multitasking 
which is ostensibly the same as what she calls divided attention or multiple 
loci of attention. Multitasking is, in fact, “continually switching between 
different activities rather than performing and completing tasks in a serial 
manner”. Both Preece (
ibid.
) and Raskin (2000:16) acknowledge that our 
ability to perform tasks is sequential, or serial, rather than truly parallel. 
But the question arises here of how we switch our attention from one 
task to another. After all, if we are focussed on one task, how can we 
switch to another task if we are capable of consciously processing and re-
sponding to only one task or stimulus? This is a wide-ranging and problem-
atic question in cognitive psychology and it would be impractical to discuss 
every aspect of this issue here. Instead, we will discuss the main theories as 
to how attention switches from one task or stimulus to another. 
But before we embark on this discussion of attention, however, it would 
serve us well to quickly recap on preceding paragraphs. We know that our 
senses are constantly receiving information and that this information is 
stored temporarily in sensory memory or registers. We also know that at-
tention fundamentally refers to the active, conscious processing of informa-
tion at a given time. This means that just one of the numerous sources of 
information or stimuli is being processed. Attention is, therefore, the proc
124 
ess

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Attention & Selection
by which we select information from the mass of incoming information and
process it. 
Numerous theories have been formulated over the decades to account 
for the way our attention changes focus to concentrate on various stimuli. 
Fundamental to all of these theories is the question of what happens to the 
“unattended” information (Ellis & Hunt 1993:50), or rather the informa-
tion we are not paying attention to at any given moment. The main ap-
proaches to answering this question are grouped under Bottleneck Theories 
(Gavin 1998:34) and Capacity Models (Gavin 1998:37; Ellis & Hunt 
1993:50-52) below.