Executing the instructions. An empirical investigation into the usability of technical translations done by trainees

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal empirical study on the acquisition of translation competence as concerns technical translation. The study comprised the assignment of two different translations of a number of extracts from a snowmobile service manual administered to translator trainees at an interval of a month. The first task was followed by a seminar on technical translation focused on a genre analysis of instructional documents and aimed at providing guidelines to produce better translations. On the basis of the relevant literature and the analysis of a small-scale corpus of automotive instruction manuals originally written in Italian, the target texts were assessed in terms of syntactic structure and Iconic Linkage. Finally, a relation between the translations’ usability and their overall quality is investigated.