Stylistic Variation in Multilingual Instructions

Instructional texts have been the object of many studies recently, motivated by the increased need to produce manuals (especially multilingual manuals) coupled with the cost of translators and technical writers. Because these studies concentrate on aspects other than the linguistic realisation of instructions – for example, the integration of text and graphics – they all generate a sequence of steps required to achieve a task, using imperatives. Our research so far shows, however, that manuals can in fact have different styles, i.e., not all instructions are stated using a sequence of imperatives, and that, furthermore, different parts of manuals often use different styles. In this paper, we present our preliminary results from an analysis of over 30 user guides/manuals for consumer appliances and discuss some of the implications.