Alignment is the process of adding material to a TM from existing pairs of documents (source and translation) that were translated without using a TM tool. By aligning these files, you can recycle their content into a TM to use when you subsequently translate similar material in SDL Trados Studio or another TM tool.
Alignment can be time consuming, especially with large files in which the source and target documents have different segmentation (for example, if sentences in the source document have been split up into smaller sentences in the target document). In these situations, it is often worth spending time to prepare the documents themselves to ensure that their structures are similar before you align them. For example, identical structures created by keeping whole sentences together will improve alignment results.
The new alignment tool in SDL Trados Studio 2014 is particularly useful if you want to do a quick and dirty alignment in the knowledge that you are unlikely to re-use all of the aligned TUs anyway. It is therefore a good idea to import the alignment results into a separate TM used for reference purposes only in order to not contaminate your main TM(s) with incorrect alignments.
In SDL Trados Studio 2014, files are aligned into a SDL Trados Studio TM (.sdltm
). Unlike with WinAlign, the alignment tool in previous versions, there is at the time of writing no dedicated post-alignment editor for correcting misaligned segments. Once you have aligned the segments, however, you can modify them by dragging and dropping text from one TU to another, spot-edit the source and target cells in the Translation Memories view, and remove erroneously paired segments.
In the Welcome or Translation Memories view, from the Home tab, click the Align Documents button, shown in the following screenshot:
To align your source and target files, perform the following steps:
If you have added the files by folder rather than individually, you may need to click the relevant folder name on the left to display the files in the Source File and Target File panes on the right, as shown in the following screenshot:
Click Add again and add the target files in the same way. If you add files by folder, files with matching filenames, including those in subfolders, will be paired up automatically. In our example, the digits 9/9 after the name of the source files folder on the left of the screenshot tell us that all nine source files have been paired with a target file.
To remove an incorrect target file and add the correct one, or to add a target file for a source file for which no partner was found automatically, in the Target file list, select the file and from the right-click menu, choose Add target file or Remove target file, as shown in the following screenshot:
To remove incorrectly added files, select the file(s) and choose Remove and the appropriate option from the list. In the following screenshot, we manually remove a temporary file that was left in the source folder and mistakenly picked up for alignment. When the filenames are paired up correctly, click Next.
The Alignment quality value is derived from a mechanism used by SDL Trados Studio to determine the reliability of the segment pairings (that is, the assumed probability that the pairing will be correct). For example, the default setting of 70% means that any segments given a reliability factor of less than 70% will not be aligned. It is worth experimenting with various values to obtain the best results. For more details on the logic behind this, see the SDL help pages at http://tinyurl.com/align-quality.
If this leaves you with an empty cell in the TU (whether in the source, target, or both), you will not be able to confirm the change, as indicated by the red cross icon shown on the left side of the following screenshot (in which we have also merged the text in the target cells of the two TUs):
Assuming that you are happy to delete the TU from the TM, you can get round this problem by marking the TU with the empty cell(s) for deletion, via Mark TU for Deletion, as described earlier in this appendix. It will then be deleted when you confirm the other changes that you have made during this editing process (via Commit Changes). Alternatively, you can cancel the pending changes via Discard TU Changes.
When you translate a document in the Editor using the aligned TM, an alignment penalty of 1% is applied to any matches produced by alignment, as shown in the following screenshot. This is to alert you to the need to double-check matches from segments produced by alignment, which will in many cases of course be less reliable than those that you have added to a TM by translating a text in the Editor. Note that this can result in high levels of 99% matches in the Analyze Files report. To adjust the alignment penalty, under Project Settings, choose Translation Memory and Automated Translation | Penalties.