I’ve always thought that the old I.T.s-guy’s [I don’t know how to better translate the vernacular for IT-expert] saying “When all attempts fail, try reading the manual“, which for present purposes I’ll rephrase to the more accurate “Read the manual only when all other attempts fail“, is largely meant as a joke. It isn’t. My original point was by way of saying that I read mostly technical manuals (i.e., documentation for I.T.s), not “help” manuals for “blondes” (Blonde-Ladies is perhaps a better translation?).
It’s really rare that I find such help useful. Most of the time, I just get told to do it the way I’ve (logically) already done it – and not a word about what to do if it still doesn’t work. Alternatively, that I should click on a button that I would expect to be there and would like to click on even without help, but somehow it’s not there.
(The reasons for this are various: sometimes because it’s disabled in the configuration; sometimes because it’s no longer in this version or is elsewhere under a different name; a popular problem is also that the manual was translated by someone else and/or ignorant of the issue, so the translation in the menu is completely different from the manual: well, you tell me, if I translated such the Save once as Put [at disk] and the second time as Save in the sense of “Save the Queen”, would you find it? [Note on the EN version: here I had to use three different labels, because a literal translation would not make sense.])
With complete clarity, traditionally Microsoft leads the way-I almost always berate myself for being tempted to read the “help” and not do it straight by myself (MS’s help is apparently intended mainly to confuse the enemy). But it’s a general problem. So I wouldn’t translate labels that also represent technical terms at all-translate only their explanations.
The specific case is then the various bots (typically on phone support) that will first repeat to me 3 times what I’ve already read on the site or in the results from Google-well, I probably wouldn’t call you if I needed any of that), product or even drug manuals (which apparently serve mainly as a legal document to evolve out of any liability for possible damages). But perhaps more on that another time.
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