How to…
Align documents

You can leverage existing translations by segmenting the original document and the translation, matching their segments with each other, and reusing the segment pairs during translation. This procedure is called alignment.

Traditional alignment does not end with importing the two monolingual documents. After the manual segment pair matching, you need to revise the entire alignment document, fix all errors and create a translation memory out of the matching segments. This is a tedious process as you need to align segments that you will not reuse, and you need to perform the alignment before you start translating. Traditionally there is no way to quantify whether it’s worth aligning a document pair. You can perform the traditional alignment in memoQ following the steps below.

memoQ’s LiveAlign™ technology is a game-changing innovation that removes the burden of aligning before translation. What’s more, you only need to check the alignment for segments that you are translating. With LiveAlign™ it is enough to import the two documents into a corpus and start translating. Fixing the possible errors in the alignment is possible from the translation grid. You don’t need to make sure that all segments are correct because you can come back to the alignment at any time during and after the translation.

The steps of the alignment process are the following:

1. Create or open a project.

Use the New memoQ project wizard to create a new project, or open an existing project.

2. Check the translation memory.

If you are using the traditional alignment, make sure that the project includes the translation memory where you want to export the alignment results, and it is set as the primary translation memory of the project. You can check this under the Translation memories pane of Project home. You don’t need to do this if you are using LiveAlign™.

3. Create a LiveDocs corpus and add the document pairs.

In the LiveDocs pane of Project home, create a new corpus using Create/add new. Click Add alignment pair to add the documents you want to import for alignment. You can also import multiple file pairs at once using the Add multiple alignments command.

4. Edit the alignment results.

If you are using the traditional alignment, open the aligned document pairs one by one in the alignment grid and check the correctness of the alignment. All links will be auto links, indicated by green lines. When finished, choose Confirm All Auto Links in the Alignment menu or the MemoQ align confirm all auto icon Align documents to create a translation memory icon in the toolbar to confirm all green auto links. Confirmed auto links become synchro links and are indicated by blue lines.

If you are using LiveAlign™, just start translating and if you find that a match from the LiveDocs corpus is not correct, select the match from Translation results, right-click on it and select Show document. This will open the alignment grid where you fix the alignment. Everything else can be auto-aligned.

Note: It is not necessary to link all segments. You can choose to export linked segments even when some segments remained unlinked.

5. Export the results to the primary translation memory.

If you are using the traditional alignment, choose Export To TM in the Alignment menu or the MemoQ align export to primary tm icon Align documents to create a translation memory icon in the toolbar to export the alignment results to the primary translation memory.

If you are using LiveAlign™, you don’t need to do this.

Note: Only confirmed links indicated by blue lines will be exported. Auto links indicated by green will be ignored.

See also:

Align documents to create a translation memory