USABILITY TESTING/ENGINEERING

Imagine that you're an automotive engineer who is designing a new and sporty hybrid. While you may be anxious to bring it to market, you'll need to subject your prototype to a series of tests to guarantee that the end result can be operated safely and comfortably. In other words, your product needs to be made usable.

Before a technical document (such as an owner's manual or a set of instructions) can be published, it needs to be evaluated at different stages of its development. Usability testing/engineering (I'll refer to it as usability engineering) is a layered and complex form of quality control designed to ensure the usability and accessibility of technical documents. 

The core principles of usability engineering apply equally to technical translations. Usability is a frame of reference by which the impact, memorability, efficiency, and versatility of technical documentation is measured. Usability engineering is a heuristic process involving user observation and feedback through a number of interactive tools:

• Interviews
• Surveys
• Questionnaires
• Participant background information
• Feedback through interactive software
• Direct and indirect observation of subjects

The design and interpretation of these methods can vary greatly, given the type of documentation that is being tested and the backgrounds of the subjects participating in the testing process. A multidisciplinary approach for any one project could include expertise in ergonomics, computer science, brand design, etc.—depending upon the complexity of the work.

User experience professionals come from many backgrounds (Quesenbery, 2011) © UPA, found on the
UPA website at: http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/usability_resources/organizations/

One especially effective method of testing a translation for user-friendliness is back translation, by which previously translated are translated back into the source language. If a translated work re-translates well, then it is considered to be most likely accurate and usable.

Technical translation can require even more collaboration than that needed for the creation of domestic technical documents, since the translation process typically involves more participants. Where a domestic work involves a producer and a writer, a translation requires a producer, a writer, a translation producer, and a translation writer (translator). Engineering a translation for usability can be even more challenging than producing a user-friendly domestic work.

Some informative links:

Some usability engineering templates from a "usability toolkit:" http://www.stcsig.org/usability/resources/toolkit/toolkit.

From the Journal of Usability Studies, here is a set of links to a series of articles concerning usability studies: 
http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/previous.html

An interesting article about the overlap of usability testing and technical communication: 
http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2011may/redish2.html

CULTURAL RESEARCH

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do." But, before you get to Rome, you'll need to find out exactly what it is the Romans "do."

Before a technical translation gets underway, a translator needs to gather a certain amount of background information about the audience that the translation is intended for. This can be a bit of a challenge if the audience is "foreign" to the translator.

Some degree of insight into the culture(s) of the target audience for a technical document is necessary for an effective analysis of that audience. Respecting the social, political, economic, historical, and linguistic characteristics of a specific culture is often a prerequisite for usable technical documents. 

For the sake of clarity, cultural research can be broken down into “three Cs": 

Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Psychology, and Cross-cultural Communication

While cultural anthropology involves the study of the impacts of global-scale economic and political phenomena on a specific, local culture; cultural psychology involves a more specialized understanding of the psyche and behaviors unique to and shaped by that particular culture. Some degree of understanding of what makes a culture “tick” and knowing how a native audience will respond to certain symbols, colors, semantic and syntactic constructs, etc. is essential.

Cross-cultural communication is a fast-growing research area which concerns finding the best way to incorporate cultural anthropology and cultural psychology into effective communication across cultural lines. No matter how simple or complex the translation, some degree of applied cross-cultural communication is necessary. A grasp of such linguistic constructs as semiotics, syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics is imperative. Understanding the impact of certain colors and symbols on an audience can be essential. Colors have widely different interpretations varying from one culture to the next; and icons and other symbols can reflect great perceptual contrasts. 

Understanding the impact of a document's words and images on the user will mean the difference between a usable document and one that either confuses and/or offends.

Some Informative Links:

What Place Does Cultural Anthropology Have in Translation Programs of the 21st Century? 
http://www.gial.edu/images/gialens/vol2-2/McKinneyAbbot-Cult%20Anthro%20in%20Translation.pdf

Here's a primer for translation and cross-cultural communication: 
http://www.language-translation-help.com/cross-cultural-communication.html


Here's a more detailed primer for translation and cross-cultural communication: 
http://www.epictrends.com/resources/localization/Think%20globally.shtml 

DITA

Imagine creating a user's manual from scratch only to find out that much of the content had already been produced. The precious time and effort you'd spent reinventing the wheel could have been saved if you had access to the right software and platform in the first place. 

Interchangeable, reusable content is fully supported and facilitated by a phenomenon that is having a significant impact on the entire field of technical publishing as well as technical translation. DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML-supported (Extensible Markup Language) system by which content is rendered interchangeable between different documents via applicable software and databases. [This is made possible in part through “inheritance” (as it applies to computer science) which I will describe in a later post]. DITA supports such information models as topic-based authoring and single source publishing. The objective is to save time and money and to ensure accuracy through the “modularization” of information. Technical content is concise and can typically be broken down into sections that stand alone as distinct chunks of information. These chunks can be easily reused in future works.

A DITA map demonstrating a pattern of specialization

Topic-based authoring involves breaking down “modules” of information from whole documents into “topics” that can be produced, supported, and reused for inclusion in new documents. A topic could be variously described (through a "DITA map") as a reference item, a task, a concept, or an example. Topics in one document are tagged according to their content and can be accessed for use in future documents. For example, a new user’s manual for an upgraded product can reuse content from an older version. The same description for a particular part can be used for different products which include the same part.

Single source publishing involves the reuse of content for different documents and formats (e.g. content from a user’s manual can be reused for a webpage or developed into part of an audio presentation).

                                          Part One of a mandatory overview of DITA

As an OASIS-supported (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) information hierarchy, DITA is widely accepted, supported by many users, and developed by many developers. Authoring through DITA is supported by such XML editors and processors as Quark XML editor and Adobe FrameMaker.

DITA allows the process of technical translation to be facilitated through the control of the number of topics to be translated and the time and cost involved. The complexity and expense of developing such an XML-supported platform may make DITA less accessible for small organizations. However, smaller entities may be able to access a DITA platform by partnering with other entities while taking advantage of the continual advances in DITA-related software and hardware.

IBM gives a good overview of DITA mapping: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita2/