LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL PECULIARITIES OF ENGLISH INSTRUCTION MANUALS AND STRATEGIES FOR THEIR TRANSLATION INTO UKRAINIAN

Abstract

The paper focuses on lexical and grammatical peculiarities of English instruction manuals and outlines the main strategies used to translate them into Ukrainian. Instruction manuals are a highly regulated form of technical discourse intended to ensure the safe and effective operation of consumer devices, yet they have not received enough attention and remain insufficiently researched within the English–Ukrainian language combination. The increasing amount of technical documentation in the Ukrainian market and the requirement for precise, user-friendly, and standard-compliant translations make the study relevant. The research concentrates on determining the most common grammatical structures and lexical units in English instruction manuals and examining how these elements are represented in Ukrainian. The material includes authentic instructions for digital gadgets, construction tools, and household appliances. The methodology used in this study combines descriptive and comparative approaches, which makes it possible to trace both the inherent linguistic features of instructional discourse and the transformations applied in translation. The results demonstrate that the lexical profile of instruction manuals consists of general technical vocabulary, devicespecific terminology and risk-related signal words. From a grammatical perspective, English manuals rely on imperatives, modal verbs, passive forms, and concise noun groups. Since many of these structures do not have direct equivalents in Ukrainian, translators frequently employ various lexical and grammatical transformations. The most effective strategies include concretisation, generalisation, addition, omission and reordering, which help maintain clarity, naturalness and functional equivalence. Special attention is paid to the translation of safety markers, where maintaining the hierarchy of risk levels is extremely important for accurate risk communication. The study concludes that effective translation of instruction manuals requires more than linguistic competence: translators must take into account standardisation norms, user perception, and the functional specifics of technical discourse