Add alignment pair

Alignment is a way to match the segments in a document to the segments in the translation of the same document. If you have a document and its translation, it is called a document pair. You can add a document pair to LiveDocs corpora. When you add a document pair to a LiveDocs corpus, memoQ aligns the segments in the documents – in other words, it matches each segment with its translation from the translation document. First, both documents are broken up into segments, and then the corresponding segments are matched using statistical and linguistic algorithms. Although memoQ's automatic alignment results are in many cases superior to those of other translation tools, human revision may be necessary in some cases for good results.

While you can perform alignment before the translation, and this has been a traditional workflow, with memoQ's LiveAlign technology, the alignment pair immediately becomes searchable in the LiveDocs corpus. There is no need to export the alignment results to a translation memory before the translation. You can also add new document pairs to the corpus while you are translating – the newly added segments start giving you exact and fuzzy matches in a few seconds afterwards.

The Add alignment pairs dialog allows you to add a pair of document to the selected LiveDocs corpus. After importing the documents, memoQ immediately runs the alignment.

Note: To view results of the alignment, you can open the newly added alignment pair in the alignment grid view using the LiveDocs pane of Project home.

How to begin

In Project home, navigate to the LiveDocs pane: click the LiveDocs icon on the left. Then, select a LiveDocs corpus in the upper list. Then, on the LiveDocs ribbon tab, click the Add Alignment Pairs button.

Commands and options

Meta-information section:

•Keywords text box: Type one or more keywords for the alignment pair. If you have many documents in a LiveDocs corpus, you can search for the documents using these keywords. If you type two or more keywords, separate them with semicolons (;).

Source language file section:

•Source language drop-down list: Choose the source language for the language pair. If you are managing a LiveDocs corpus from an open project (the Project home tab), this drop-down list is greyed out because the source language must always match the source language of the project. If you are managing a corpus from the Resource console, you can choose any language here – LiveDocs corpora are multilingual, and the set of languages in a corpus is not fixed.

•Target language drop-down list: Choose the target language for the language pair. If you are managing a LiveDocs corpus from an open project (the Project home tab), you can choose from the target languages of the current project. If you are managing a corpus from the Resource console, you can choose any language here – LiveDocs corpora are multilingual, and the set of languages in a corpus is not fixed.
 

Documents section:

Check the Re-align pairs automatically when new documents are added check box to re-align document pairs when you add documents to the below list.

•Use the Add source documents link to add your source documents. This command is similar to the Import command link for documents in the Translations pane. You cannot change the document import options.

•Use the Add source documents as link to add your source documents. This command is similar to the Import with options command link for documents in the Translations pane. You can change the document import options here.

•Use the Add source folder structure to add a whole folder structure. This command is similar to the Import folder structure command link for documents in the Translations pane. You can import not only documents but the whole folder structure where your documents are in. You do not need to select documents from folders or subfolders. Import the whole folder structure instead.

•Use the Add target documents, Add target documents as and Add target folder structure links to import the same documents in your selected target language.

memoQ will automatically link the documents based on their file name. In case a document pair is not linked, select the source document on the source side and the same document on the target side, then click the Link documents link. The same way you can unlink documents. Select the document on the source and target side in the list, then click the Unlink documents link.

Click the Remove entry link to remove an alignment pair from the list. This alignment pair will then not be imported in the corpus.

Click the Auto-align documents link to automatically align the documents in your list.

Alignment options section:

•Structural alignment check box: This text box is available when you align Excel, XML, or RESX documents. If the documents contain identifiers for each segment, memoQ can use these identifiers to match the segments together. In this case, memoQ does not use the 'traditional' mathematical algorithm – instead, it just looks for the identifiers. With structured documents, this alignment method is much faster and more precise than the mathematical algorithm. Check this check box if you want memoQ to use segment identifiers instead of mathematics. Check the Do not segment content check box to not segment the documents on import. If you check this check box, memoQ imports the source and target documents without segmenting the file to sentences, i.e., the effect is the same as using an empty segmentation rule set for both languages under Project home > Settings > Segmentation rules.

•Use terms as anchors check box: Check this check box if you want memoQ to look for terms in the aligned documents. You need term bases in your project to do this. If memoQ finds a source term in a source segment, and its translation in a target segment, it is an indication that the two segments belong together.

•Look up terms now check box: Normally, memoQ queries the term bases while matching the segments together. However, if you think memoQ will find a lot of terms, tick this check box: then memoQ will read through the documents and look up all possible terms up front: this makes the alignment process quicker.

•Term base with the highest rank only check box: Check this check box if your project has multiple term bases, but you want the alignment to use the highest ranked term base only. If you have large reference term bases, this can also make alignment run faster.

•Minimum term length spin box: Set the minimum length of terms that the aligner should deal with. Short terms can result in a lot of false anchors, which can slow down the alignment process. Normally, you should not change this number, unless you have specific abbreviations in your term base that you want memoQ to match in the documents.

•Compare bold/italic/underline check box: Check this check box if you want memoQ to use bold/italic/underline formatting as an indication that two segments belong together.

•Compare inline tags check box: Check this check box if your documents have inline tags and you want memoQ to use them as an indication that two segments belong together. Note that this works only when the two documents are in the same document format (for example, both are DOCX files), and their formatting is fairly similar.

Navigation

Click OK to launch the alignment process. If you click Cancel, memoQ closes the dialog without adding the alignment pair.