Alignment - can you merge segments?

Question

In Align you can split segments, but it is often useful to be able to merge them. Some programs allow this but I can't see any way to do this in Trados.

Claudio Nasso · Answer

Hi Nigel Lindup , 
 as Paul has already said, SDL Align does not offer an option to automatically merge two segments, but here I suggest a possible workaround. 
 Suppose you have two text documents to align similar to the following and with an error in the original text, indicated by the red arrow (i.e., a carriage return after "uniform grammar," which should not be there) but not reflected in the target document:

When you load them into SDL Align you will get a result similar to the following which merged the two incorrectly separated paragraphs in the original into one in the target document, automatically resolving the problem (segments 6 and 7 of the original aligned to the segment 6 of the target document): 
 
 However, if you prefer, you can simply select segments 6 and 7 of the original and disconnect (CTRL+ALT+D) the proposed alignment and get: 
 
 You can then select and cut (CTRL+X) the text of segment 7 of the original and paste it (CTRL+V) after inserting a space after the comma of segment 6 of the original: 
 
 Finally, you can reactivate the 1 to 1 connection between the two segments 6 (CTRL+SHIFT+D): 
 
 leaving blank (and ignoring) segment 7 of the original. 
 And I think this is the only possible way to merge two segments in an alignment process. 
 I hope this may help you. 
 Claudio

Paul · Answer

Nigel Lindup 
 You do actually have access to another alignment tool in Studio if you installed the Power Pack from the appstore. In there you can access the old winalign tool from Trados and this can merge segments. The drawback is it supports less file formats today as it hasn't been updated to support modern tools, but it might be useful for you, especially if you have the ability to downsave the source files for the purpose of alignment. 
 Once installed you'll find it here: 
 C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\SDL\T2007\TT\Winalign.exe 
 There is actually a scenario I didn't cover and this would be when you need to merge source segments AND target segments. You can do this with max. of two: 
 
 But try to add another and the option is greyed. Similarly if you have a max. of five when you merge only source or only target then it's fine: 
 
 Anything else and it's greyed. 
 So the workaround to copy one into another is perfect, especially as you just ignore anything you don't want to align. Also note you can select text across segments for this so the process is actually pretty quick. 
 Using winalign I just aligned the first twelve segments in source to show you. Unrealistic but does show the difference and what's possible using winalign. It's not compatible with an SDTM however, so you will have to export to TMX and then import this into an SDLTM. 
 So from this: 
 
 To this: 
 
 Quite nice even though it is so old. I was reminded of this tool last night in fact as Riccardo Schiaffino asked me a similar sort of question since he was disappointed we didn't ship this hidden gem anymore with 2021. But it is available with the Power Pack as noted earlier. 
 Perhaps this will be useful for you?

Paul · Answer

Nigel Lindup 
 There is no need to merge segments in alignment... you just join whichever segments you want to be together by aligning them.

Trados Studio > 1. Trados Studio

Alignment - can you merge segments?

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