Documentation Center

Correcting alignment connections and text

If you want to align files that do not mirror each other or files with little unique content (proper names, numbers, dates, measurements etc.), Trados Studio may incorrectly determine how sentence pairs belong together. Therefore, it is essential that you correct alignments.

About this task

When you are checking an alignment result file in the Alignment view, you can correct any mistakes that you spot in the content of the aligned segments.

You can correct such misalignments in the Alignment view when aligning files with review or when opening alignment result files.

Procedure

  1. Go to the Welcome or Translation Memories view, and on the Home tab, select Align Documents > Open Alignment.
  2. Correct simple alignment connections in one of the following ways:
    • Connect and disconnect via select operations:
      1. Disconnect the segments which are not correctly aligned. Select the row number in the source column and, on the Home tab, in the Segment Actions group, select Disconnect. Repeat this for all misaligned segments.
      2. Create 1:1 connections by linking one source segment to one target segment. Select the checkboxes next to the source and target segment, then select Connect 1:1. You can have multiple segments selected, the first unconnected source segment from selection will connect with the first unconnected target segment from selection, then the second one and so on.
      3. Connect source segments with target segments to align them. Press CTRL + select a row number in the source column and the row number in the target column that you want to connect it with. Then, on the Home tab, in the Connect group, select Connect. The Connect button is only available for disconnected segments. Repeat this for all misaligned segments. When you select Connect, the selected segments are connected, the alignment pair is confirmed, and the quality value of the alignment is set to the maximum value of 100. Note that for *.sdlretrofit files, you can only connect segments that are in the same paragraph.
    • Connect and disconnect via drag-and-drop operations:
      1. Press CTRL + select the segments you want to connect by selecting the source and target row numbers. This highlights the segments in yellow.
      2. Grab the source or target row by pressing the left-mouse button and drag it on top of the corresponding segment. Drag-and-drop is available only for 1:1 connections.
  3. Confirm or reject alignment connections.
  4. Select inside the source or target segment you want to correct. Add, delete and move text as required. You can also use the Cut, Copy, Paste options on the Ribbon or in the context menu.
  5. Save the changes to the alignment result file:
    • On the Home tab, select Save to save the changes you made to the alignment result file, so that it gets saved as *.sdlalign or *.sdlretrofit.
    • On the Home tab, select Save > Save SDLXLIFF to save the files in its *.sdlxliff version. You can use the *.sdlxliff to make further changes to the alignment file in the Editor view. For *.sdlretrofit, select Update SDLXLIFF file to add the Retrofit changes to the *.sdlxliff file.