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.
