UPDATE : Daniel Brockmann and Kevin Flanagan, here is a screenshot and additional insights (below) regarding flaws in alphanumeric correspondence analysis:

In that case, I don't understand why the first corresponding entry for “Sections 7-11” is the one which originally was “Section 8(2) => Par. 8(2)” – marked as a 94% match, and erroneously suggesting “Par. 7(11)”.

It would have been more logic to match it with the existing entry “Sections 5 and 6 => Articles 5 et 6”, marked as a 76% match. Although it remains imperfect (suggesting “Articles 7 et 11”, while it should be “Articles 7-11” or “Articles 7 à11”), it is technically much closer than the supposedly 94% match.

As for suggestions 3 and 4, they improperly consider phone numbers (respectively “613 555-7890” and “+ 613 555-4567”) as fuzzy matches for “Sections 7-11”, which is nowhere near an actual match.

Aside from the latter inconsistency, there should definitely be a better consideration of typographic characters (hyphens, parentheses, brackets, spaces, etc.) AND letters or specific words (“and”, “or”, etc.) in alphanumeric segment matching. That in itself would most likey increase relevance in results. It would clearly not be sufficient to correct all alphanumeric matching inconsistencies, but it might still be a good start.

Update: Although I said the the first proposition in the table above “should indeed stay at 100%”, even that is open to debate, since the “1” was switched to “2”. In thw case of Qs&As, that is perfectly fine and even desirable, but I guess in other cases the automatic substitution by increment would not necessarily fit as a 100% match... so maybe the numerical incrementation should also be included as a option that could be switched on of off, depending on context. 

P.S. In addition to what I said last week about that issue, there is one important thing that should be updated in the way alphanumeric recognition and matching percentage work in Trados Studio, Daniel Brockmann and Kevin Flanagan: whenever the proposed translation results from an automatic substitution, it should always come with a penalty (or at least, we should be offered to add a penalty in the options).

For instance, in the case below, as I mentioned, the correspondences I have in my memory are respectively “A1. => R1.” and “Q1. => Q1.”, so the first one should indeed stay at 100%, while the second one should have a penalty and be marked at 99% or less. As for the last one, I don't think it should be considered as a match at all, not even a fuzzy one. And it should especially NOT be the case for such things as “(7th) 98” (which now does not appear anymore in my results, since I deleted from my TM altogether).



As an illustration, based on that flawed logic, Trados could aguably consider a Mazda3 as a close equivalent to an Audi Q100 or a Porsche 911. As you see, that definitely doesn't reflect reality... 

I can only agree that this topic needs to be looked at very closely. We also have a lot of texts like this and also struggle with the way that Studio handles them. As you say below, the fact that disabling the alphanumeric recognition prevents setting such things as 100% matches is also unfortunate.

That's a correct workaround to avoid improper propagation (plus, as Daniel Hug suggested, I made sure to check “Matching segment has been translated differently” (see screenshot below). Still, I would like my Qs&As to automatically set both “Q[number]. => Q[number].” AND “A[number]. => R[number].” as 100% matches, to avoid changing them individually, and disabling the alphanumeric recognition inconveniently prevents that at the same time.

More importantly, as I mentioned, the fact that Trados would even consider “(7th) 98” as a close to “A1.” (and suggesting “(A1) 98.” as a possible translation) indicates a flawed analysis algorithm that would definitely need to be refined.