Documentation Center

Color codes and tooltips for alignment connections

In the Alignment view, SDL Trados Studio displays the aligned the source and target documents on two side-by-side columns. Studio segments the two documents that form the alignment result file (*.sdlalign or *.sdlretrofit) according to the segmentation rules that you specified for the selected translation memory (TM) before starting the alignment.

Each source and target segments are linked together by a connection line that creates an alignment pair. The color of the connection lines and the tooltip that Studio displays for each alignment pair give you more information about the quality of the alignment pairs.

Connection line color

The color of the connection line indicates the level of confidence that Studio has in the quality of the alignment when comparing it to the other alignments in the document.

The table below lists the different line colors and styles that Studio can assign to connections in the Alignment view.

Line ColorAlignment RatingLine StyleAlignment Confirmation Status

Green

Good

Continuous

Confirmed Alignment

Yellow

Average

Dotted

Unconfirmed Alignment

Red

Bad

Grey

Disconnected Segment

Tooltip information

Hover over a segment number to display tooltip information about the quality of the selected alignment. The tooltip shows the current rating, quality value and confirmation status for the alignment that the selected segment is part of.

Quality Value

Studio calculates the alignment quality value considering linguistic and contextual dependencies between the source and target segments. The result is then compared to the other alignment pairs available in the current alignment result file. The more unique content shared between the source and the target segments that form the alignment, the higher the quality value for the alignment pair.

The alignment connections that you confirm manually always receive a quality value of 100.

You can use this alignment quality value to triage the alignments that you import into your specified TM. For more information, see Setting Alignment TM Import Options.

When you send the alignment results as translation units (TUs) to the specified TM, Studio tags each TU with this quality value in the Quality custom field of the TU.

When you save the alignment result file as *.sdlxliff for further review in the Editor view, Studio uses the alignment quality value as the TM match score for the segment pair. For more information, see Saving Alignment Files.

Rating

Studio rates alignments by comparing their quality value with other alignments available in the *.sdlalign file. This means that if your alignment result file contains mostly high-quality alignments, Studio may give a Bad rating to an alignment with a high quality value. This is to draw attention to the alignments that have the lowest quality value in the document.

Confirmation Status

When you first open an alignment result file in the Alignment view, all the alignment connection are set to Unconfirmed. The Unconfirmed status is indicated by a dotted connection line , colored according to the alignment quality rating.

You can change the confirmation status by confirming or rejecting alignments or by correcting connections.

Segment number hints

For *.sdlretrofit files, you can only align segments that are from the same paragraph. When you click a target (or source) segment number to make a connection, you can see which of the source (or target) segments are compatible (i.e. from the same paragraph), as their segment numbers are highlighted in bold and blue color.