3.1 - Text Alignment

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What is Alignment?

ALIGNMENT is a process that allows you to import existing translations into a TM. Imagine that you already have several source documents in English and their translation into Czech. The problem is though, that these translated documents cannot be taken advantage of, as they are not in the right format for the CAT tool of your choice.

Fortunately, there is a special import/export format (see Figure 2) that enables translators to pour externally translated segments (translation units or TUs for short). This file format has an extension *.tmx, which stands for TRANSLATION MEMORY EXCHANGE FORMAT (TMX).

TMX allows any tool that uses translation memories to import and export databases between their own native formats. It is therefore possible to start a particular translation assignment in SDL Trados and then continue the same translation on a different computer with the use of e.g. OmegaT or Star Transit.

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Reflection #1: What sort of texts do you think are suitable for alignment?

 

SDL Trados uses the WinAlign component (see Figure 1) to align source document with its translation. Unfortunately, WinAlign is only available, if you buy a license to SDL Trados Professional edition.

Thankfully, the same team that currently works on OmegaT+ project also developed a standalone application called bitext2tmx that is available for free and which offers the same text aligning functionality.

The main challenge during alignment is to determine whether segments or entire paragraphs were left out during translation. Sometimes content is left out, because it is not relevant for the target audience. Also, translators often change the segmentation, e.g. by combining two source segments into one. Though WinAlign uses a sophisticated algorithm to detect such discrepancies between the source and the target text, the alignment should be reviewed by a human proofreader.

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Reflection #2: Why is it necessary that alignment output is proofread?


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