Studio 2014 Alignment "module": summary of issues

Question

Hello Community, 
 I was asked by Paul Filkin to post my Alignment review here and hopefully it will cause many comments and of course also improvements of this Studio feature. Altogether I have to say that the Studio 2014 alignment feature is much worse than the standalone WinAlign, at least regarding usability (we haven't tested accuracy improvements). 
 Bertrand Gillert LocaSoft GmbH, Bonn 
 Realign from current segment command 
 There is no Realign from current segment command. The Studio Realign command also realigns segments above the current segment. This is very bad if there are some purposely non-aligned segments (as in our alignment jobs: additional text in the target). 
 This command existed in WinAlign. 
 No connecting using the mouse 
 Very bad! I always have to select the corresponding segments and right-click on Connect. 
 Selection of multiple segments not possible 
 For whatever reason, Align made &ldquo;millions&rdquo; of alignment mistakes. I have to remove the misalignments one by one! A very tedious and obsolete task. Why can&rsquo;t I select any number of segments at once and disconnect them? Or add a Disconnect till the end command. 
 No Search feature 
 I cannot search for text. Helpful if matches are not visible on one screen. Maybe a bookmark feature could also help in this regards. 
 Altogether I have to say that Studio Align is a serious step back. 
 Disconnect removes ALL links 
 If there is a 1:n alignment and I just want to remove one segment Studio removed all links. In WinAlign, one could only remove a single link, the others were preserved. 
 Export TMX 
 Should be possible via File menu. Currently one has to create/add a memory and has to export it after &ldquo;transferring&rdquo; the alignment results to the memory. Much too time-consuming. 
 No File Type Selection 
 I cannot select or edit the file type of the files to be aligned. We have Java properties files which require a special file type definition. There will be much less matches since the aligned TM will contain text instead of placeholders. 
 Settings used for the translation task: 
 
 Actually strings like %1 should be a placeholder; however this Start Tag only marks the % character as internal (e.g. %1). But that&rsquo;s still better than nothing. 
 Creating links using mouse not possible (anymore) 
 One has to select each segment until it&rsquo;s &ldquo;yellow&rdquo; and right-click for confirm: 
 
 Almost a nightmare; costs lots of wasted time!

Paul · Accepted Answer

Thanks Bertrand, useful feedback. In general I agree we need to do some work on improving the usability of this module, but first a few comments... it may also be worth you reviewing this article for a few tips which might be helpful. 
 Unknown said: There is no Realign from current segment command. The Studio Realign command also realigns segments above the current segment. This is very bad if there are some purposely non-aligned segments (as in our alignment jobs: additional text in the target). 
 If it wasn't for the puposely omitted alignments I would say this could be resolved by aligning above the current segment before you ran this option. But this specific usecase clearly causes a problem for you. 
 Unknown said: 
 No connecting using the mouse : Very bad! I always have to select the corresponding segments and right-click on Connect. 
 
 This is possible with the mouse. But it is tricky to achieve compared to WinAlign. I find I have to click the segment number first so it goes yellow and then I can drag the connection over with the mouse. So a two click operation each time. Probably easier to work in alignment edit mode with the checkboxes. 
 Unknown said: For whatever reason, Align made &ldquo;millions&rdquo; of alignment mistakes. I have to remove the misalignments one by one! A very tedious and obsolete task. Why can&rsquo;t I select any number of segments at once and disconnect them? Or add a Disconnect till the end command. 
 Agreed. I can disconnect all, but not just a selection. I found the best way to work (sometimes... maybe not practical with massive files) is to adopt a two phase approach: 
 
 Disconnect all and then quickly run through the file aligning single segments every 10, 20 or 30 segments to suit 
 Then run the Realign 
 
 This way the alignment tends to be better on problematic files. 
 Unknown said: I cannot search for text. Helpful if matches are not visible on one screen. Maybe a bookmark feature could also help in this regards. 
 Yes, this would be a nice addition. 
 Unknown said: If there is a 1:n alignment and I just want to remove one segment Studio removed all links. In WinAlign, one could only remove a single link, the others were preserved. 
 Agreed. This is a feature that should be put back. 
 Unknown said: 
 Export TMX : Should be possible via File menu. Currently one has to create/add a memory and has to export it after &ldquo;transferring&rdquo; the alignment results to the memory. Much too time-consuming. 
 
 I'm not completely in agreement with you here over the importance. You can save to SDLTM or to SDLXLIFF. Both formats retaining context information and far more useful than TMX for Studio. If you want TMX because you intend to give this to someone not using Studio then the additional step to export from the SDTM or to convert the SDLXLIFF isn't a big problem. 
 Unknown said: 
 No File Type Selection : I cannot select or edit the file type of the files to be aligned. We have Java properties files which require a special file type definition. There will be much less matches since the aligned TM will contain text instead of placeholders. 
 
 You may find that this is actually possible in a roundabout way. Try creating a dummy project set up as you would like. Then make sure this project is active and now run the alignment. You may find that the alignment adopts the settings of the active project. I have not tested this enough to know how reliable this is in practice, but it could be worth looking at until we provide a better way to handle the filetype settings used for alignment. 
 This is a useful thread for you to have started as I think it's a good reference for the product teams as they work on improving this module in the future.

Paul · Answer

Unknown said: Are there any changes planned for Studio 2017? 
 Hello Dan, 
 There are changes planned for Studio 2017, but none in this first release this year. The alignment tool in Studio was created originally with the idea that users would not have to do any alignment at all, rather they make use of what can be aligned quickly and easily based on the confidence scoring it provides. This way you focus on translating so if you receive a load of files to align on Friday night to help with a translation, then rather than spend days aligning documents containing segments that may not even be really useful you get to your translation faster and probably resolve anything during the translation process faster than you would have done had you spent time correcting poor alignments in the first place. 
 That was the logic behind the original implementation of the align tool which if you recall (you may not) didn't have an alignment editor at all. 
 But clearly we didn't address the usecase where people undertake alignment projects and need to be able to align everything perfectly, or where the alignment is needed to recover bilingual files from the original formatted source and targets. So the next step was an implementation to satisfy this requirement but with a clear need to come back and address it in the future to ensure the editing environment was better. Unfortunately we have not been able to prioritise this work for the initial release of Studio 2017 but it does have a high priority for improvements after that. 
 Until then you can still use WinAlign which I know many users find useful, or as Michael suggested, and if the file format is supported, LF Align which does a pretty good job and the editing environment is simple and functional. 
 Regards 
 Paul

Paul · Answer

Unknown said: If SDL were to make the three or four improvements to aligner usability suggested in this thread it would be an adequate tool, even without improvements to the aligning itself - I don't mind doing a bit of manual intervention. 
 Hi Dan, 
 I guess you've already seen this but if not then perhaps it will be helpful as there are some small tricks you can apply for working with the Studio alignment tool that might make it easier? 
 
 Regards 
 Paul

Trados Studio > 2. Trados Studio

Studio 2014 Alignment "module": summary of issues

Realign from current segment command

No connecting using the mouse

Selection of multiple segments not possible

No Search feature

Disconnect removes ALL links

Export TMX

No File Type Selection

Creating links using mouse not possible (anymore)