The alignment tool in Studio is simply useless from the very first version until today. Switching from SDLX with its intuitive and simple alignment tool to Studio was a pain. And a Retroit batch task added in Studio 2015 is also useless now due to some major flaws of the aligner. To create a TM from two files most of us now have to use third party apps like ABBYY Aligner (great tool, by the way). So how to improve the aligner? Just use the SDLX or ABBYY tool as an example:

- Rework the editing interface: connecting segments with “strings” is a bad idea, just use “blocks” as in SDLX. Now, when scrolling the alignment interface down, “strings” are changing their form and it is confusing to find out what sentences are aligned together.

- Remove any restrictions for merging segments: allow to merge any amount of blocks in source/target and edit them.

- Improve auto alignment engine: ABBYY Aligner is much better in auto alignment now and you do not need to perform a lot of editing.

There are also many other ways to improve the aligner, but new interface without “strings” and restrictions could at least make the tool usable.