Documentation Center

Advanced import of alignments into TMs

After reviewing an alignment result (*.sdlalign) file in the Alignment view, you can send the aligned segment pairs to a translation memory (TM) as translation units (TUs) while specifying advanced settings, which determine the way TUs are imported depending on their status.

Procedure

  1. Open an alignment result file in the Alignment view by doing one of the following:
    • When you choose the Align Single File Pair option, Trados Studio automatically opens the alignment result file for review in the Alignment view.
    • When you choose the Align Multiple Files option,Trados Studio saves the alignment result file for each pair of documents if you keep the default Save alignment result files for later review option enabled on the first page of the Align Documents wizard. When the alignment is complete, Trados Studio prompts you to open the folder with alignment result files. Select and double-click on the *.sdlalign result files to open them individually in the Alignment view.
    • When you choose to open the *.sdlalign manually, do one of the following:
      • Go to File > Open Alignment, browse to the location of your *.sdlalign file and double-click to open it.
      • On Welcome view or the Translation Memories view, on the Home tab, select Align Documents > Open Alignment. Browse to the location of your *.sdlalign file and double-click to open it.
  2. In the Alignment view, on the Home tab, select Import into Translation Memory > Advanced Import.
  3. In the Translation Memory Import Wizard, on the Select Translation Memory page:
    • Select Add > File-based Translation Memory/Server-based Translation Memory (to align the results and add them to an existing TM)
    • Select Create > New File-based Translation Memory/New Server-based Translation Memory (to align the results and add them to a new TM)
  4. Select Next.
  5. On the Alignment and Translation Memory Import Options page, specify your settings for importing the alignment results into the TM:
    OptionDescription
    Alignment quality value

    Move the slider to a value between 1 and 100 to import only alignment pairs with the specified quality value and higher.

    Apply Field Values

    If the TM you are importing into has custom fields, you can specify what values should be placed in these fields for the imported translation units (TUs).

    Select Edit to display the Field Values dialog. For each field, specify or select a value and select OK.

    Import translation units as plain text

    This ignores all formatting in the import file and imports the TU content as plain text.

    This may be useful if you do not want to transfer any tags from the aligned files in order to keep the new TUs consistent with the existing TM data.

    Exclude language variants

    This does not import TUs for variants of the selected source and target language.

    For example if you are importing into an English (United Kingdom) / German (Germany) TM and you select this option, any English (United States) / German (Germany) TUs in the import file will not be imported.

    Add alignment metadata

    This adds data in the Quality, SourceFile and TargetFile custom fields of the TM you are importing TUs into. To omit metadata fields during TM import, clear the Add alignment metadata checkbox.

    If target segments differ
    Add new translation units

    This imports the new TUs as an addition to the existing ones.

    Overwrite existing translation units

    This imports the new TUs and overwrites the existing TUs in the TM.

    Leave existing translation units unchanged

    This keeps the existing TUs and does not import the new ones.

    Keep most recent translation units

    This keeps the most recently-changed TUs. Trados Studio imports a TU whose source segment is identical to that of an existing TU only if the imported unit is newer than the existing one. If the change date of the TU for import is older than the change date of the existing one, Trados Studio does not replace the existing TU.

    Use information from bilingual file to update TU system fields

    This updates the TM system fields with information from the bilingual file.

  6. Select Finish.
    The TM to which you added the TUs is automatically opened in the Translation Memories view where you can edit TUs, delete TUs and commit your changes to the TM.

What to do next

In the Translation Memories you can navigate and further edit TUs. Each TU shows the default system fields and the Quality, Source and Target File custom fields that Trados Studio assigns automatically to the alignment pairs. The quality value is calculated based on an internal alignment algorithm which considers linguistic and contextual dependencies between the source and target segments in the file. The Source and Target File fields show the location of the files from where the TU originated. To edit custom fields values, select the field value and make the required changes.

Go to the Home tab and select Commit Changes to save all TU updates and to delete all TUs which you marked for deletion. As of the Trados Studio 2018 release, you will be able to choose between:
  • Commit Changes and Re-Apply Search, to have the last item you edited automatically searched, after you commit your changes to the TM.
  • Commit Changes and Clear Search, to commit your changes to the TM, without having the last item you edited automatically searched.