Why should you align existing translations

You can align existing translated files to:

Build a TM

If you have just started using SDL Trados Studio and you do not have any TMs, you can create TM content from existing public translations. For example, you can turn public, bilingual corpora into a TM that you can then use to translate your files.

Generate a TM for translating similar text

If you want to translate the new version of a file, you can align the source and the translation of the previous version of the file to create a TM from the old translation. You can then use this TM to translate the new file. The translation matches that SDL Trados Studio finds when comparing the new file with the TM content can help you translate faster and maintain terminology consistent.

Alignment mechanism

During alignment, SDL Trados Studio matches the segments in the source language files with the translated segments in the target language files to determine which sentence pairs belong together. The tool pairs up sentences by looking at the file structure.

Knowing that files contain unique content that has to be translated and transferred into the target file, SDL Trados Studio divides the files into sections. SDL Trados Studio then analyzes the two sections by unique features like proper names, numbers, dates, measurements etc. Each time it recognizes a unique element in the source file, the Alignment tool looks for it in the target text in order to create sentence pairs and send them to an *.sdltm TM as TUs.

Types of alignment

Align with Review

• Suitable when the source files you are aligning are not exact translations of your target files.
• The alignment result files open in the Alignment view. Here you can heavily edit the connections and the segment content.
• You can then also open the alignment file in the Editor view for extra editing or QA checks.

Align without Review

• Suitable when you just want to create TM matches for your project and return to your translation work.
• The translation units generated from the alignment open in the Translation Memory view. Here you can make small edits to the TUs before importing them into the TM.

Align Single File Pair

• Suitable when you want to pair one source file to its corresponding target file and generate one single alignment result (*.sdlalign) file.
• Sends the TUs resulting from the aligned source and target file to your specified TM.

Align Multiple Files

• Suitable when you want to align several pairs of files at the same time. This generates an alignment result (*.sdlalign) file for each pair of source and target file.
• Sends the TUs that result for all the generated alignment result files to the same TM.

Align Retrofit Files

• This is an additional case where alignment is used. SDL Trados Studio performs an automatic alignment while updating the changes from an external reviewed target file. You can also choose to review and manually adjust this alignment.
• The alignment result files open in the Alignment view prior to adding the review changes to the project files. You can edit the connections, but you can only connect segments that are in the same paragraph.