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Selecting TM and documents to align

About this task

To align one pair of documents and review the alignment result in the Alignment view, specify:

  • the translation memory (TM) where you want to send the translation units that result from the alignment
  • the source and the target document that will generate the alignment result file

Select TM for the alignment results

Procedure

  1. In the Welcome or Translation Memories view, click Home tab > Align Documents > Align Single File Pair. SDL Trados Studio opens the Align Documents dialog box.
  2. Choose the TM you want to use for the alignment results:
    • click Create to use a new TM.
    • click Add to use an existing TM.
  3. Specify the type of TM to use:
    • click File-based translation memory to select a TM that you have stored on your computer.
    • click Server-based Translation Memory to select a TM stored on a TM Server.
  4. Optionally, click Settings to edit translation memory settings such as custom fields, language resources, access rights and performance.

    By default, Studio tags each translation unit generated from the alignment with three custom fields: Quality, Source File and Target File. The Quality field shows how confident Studio is that the source and target segment are aligned correctly. The quality score is calculated based on the internal alignment algorithm which considers linguistic and contextual dependencies between the source and target segments in the document. The Source and Target File fields show the location of the documents that generated the translation unit.

Select the documents to align

Procedure

  1. Click Browse under the Source File box and select the required source file.
  2. Click Browse under the Target File box and select the file that you want to map to the previously selected source file.
  3. Click Finish to start the automatic alignment and open the result in the Alignment view. By default, Studio generates an alignment result file (*.sdlalign) from the two documents and names it [name of the source file]_[name of the target file]. The file is saved in the Alignment Results folder under and add it to %UserProfile%/My Documents/Studio 2014

    After you selected the TM for the alignment results and the documents to align, click Finish to start aligning the pair of files. Studio then opens the alignment result file (*.sdlalign) in the Alignment view. Here you can edit the connections and the segment content or open the alignment file in the Editor view for extra editing or QA checks.