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Alignment is a way to match the segments in a document to the segments in the translation of the same document. If you have a document and its translation, it is called a document pair. You can add a document pair to LiveDocs corpora. When you add a document pair to a LiveDocs corpus, memoQ aligns the segments in the documents – in other words, it matches each segment with its translation from the translation document. First, both documents are broken up into segments, and then the corresponding segments are matched using statistical and linguistic algorithms. Although memoQ’s automatic alignment results are in many cases superior to those of other translation tools, human revision may be necessary in some cases for good results.
While you can perform alignment before the translation, and this has been a traditional workflow, with memoQ’s LiveAlign technology, the alignment pair immediately becomes searchable in the LiveDocs corpus. There is no need to export the alignment results to a translation memory before the translation. You can also add new document pairs to the corpus while you are translating – the newly added segments start giving you exact and fuzzy matches in a few seconds afterwards.
The Add alignment pair dialog allows you to add a pair of document to the selected LiveDocs corpus. After importing the documents, memoQ immediately runs the alignment.
Note: To view results of the alignment, you can open the newly added alignment pair in the alignment grid view using the LiveDocs pane of Project home.
Invoking In Project home, navigate to the LiveDocs pane: click the LiveDocs icon on the left. Then, select a LiveDocs corpus in the upper list. Then, below the lower list – the list of documents in the selected corpus – click the Add alignment pair command link.
Commands and options Source language file area:
| · | Language drop-down list: Choose the source language for the language pair. If you are managing a LiveDocs corpus from an open project (the Project home tab), this drop-down list is greyed out because the source language must always match the source language of the project. If you are managing a corpus from the Resource console, you can choose any language here – LiveDocs corpora are multilingual, and the set of languages in a corpus is not fixed.
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| · | In the text box below the Language drop-down list, you can type the path and name of the source-language document that you want to add to the corpus. In most cases, you use the Browse… command link instead.
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| · | Browse…: Click this command to display the Open dialog to browse for the source document.
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Target language file area:
| · | Language drop-down list: Choose the source language for the language pair. If you are managing a LiveDocs corpus from an open project (the Project home tab), you can choose from the target languages of the current project. If you are managing a corpus from the Resource console, you can choose any language here – LiveDocs corpora are multilingual, and the set of languages in a corpus is not fixed.
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| · | In the text box below the Language drop-down list, you can type the path and name of the target-language document that you want to add to the corpus. In most cases, you use the Browse… command link instead.
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| · | Browse…: Click this command to display the Open dialog to browse for the target document.
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Meta-information area:
| · | Keywords text box: Type one or more keywords for the alignment pair. If you have many documents in a LiveDocs corpus, you can search for the documents using these keywords. If you type two or more keywords, separate them with semicolons (;).
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Alignment options area:
| · | Structural alignment check box: This text box is available when you import Excel, XML, or RESX documents. If the documents contain identifiers for each segment, memoQ can use these identifiers to match the segments together. In this case, memoQ does not use the ‘traditional’ mathematical algorithm – instead, it just looks for the identifiers. With structured documents, this alignment method is much faster and more precise than the mathematical algorithm. Tick this check box if you want memoQ to use segment identifiers instead of mathematics.
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| · | Use terms as anchors check box: Tick this check box if you want memoQ to look for terms in the aligned documents. You need term bases in your project to do this. If memoQ finds a source term in a source segment, and its translation in a target segment, it is an indication that the two segments belong together.
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| · | Look up terms now check box: Normally, memoQ queries the term bases while matching the segments together. However, if you think memoQ will find a lot of terms, tick this check box: then memoQ will read through the documents and look up all possible terms up front: this makes the alignment process quicker.
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| · | Primary term base only check box: Tick this check box if your project has multiple term bases, but you want the alignment to use the primary term base only. If you have large reference term bases, this can also make alignment run faster.
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| · | Minimum term length spin box: Set the minimum length of terms that the aligner should deal with. Short terms can result in a lot of false anchors, which can slow down the alignment process. Normally, you should not change this number, unless you have specific abbreviations in your term base that you want memoQ to match in the documents.
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| · | Compare bold/italic/underline check box: Tick this check box if you want memoQ to use bold/italic/underline formatting as an indication that two segments belong together.
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| · | Compare inline tags check box: Tick this check box if your documents have inline tags and you want memoQ to use them as an indication that two segments belong together. Note that this works only when the two documents are in the same document format (for example, both are DOCX files), and their formatting is fairly similar.
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Navigation Click OK to launch the alignment process. If you click Cancel, memoQ closes the dialog without adding the alignment pair.
Add alignment pair (dialog)
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