To Align Or Not To Align
By
Jost Zetzsche
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For those who don't know what alignment is, I'll take
a stab at explaining: in the context of most computer-assisted
translation tools, alignment refers to the process
of selecting file pairs in the source and target language
that were translated outside of a translation memory
environment, matching all the segments (sentences,
headings, etc.), and creating a translation memory
database from those matches. The resulting translation
memory can then be applied to translate similar or
identical texts. SDLX, Trados, Star Transit, and Déjà
Vu all contain alignment modules in some or all configurations.
At first glance, alignment seems like a great process
that anyone starting to use a translation memory tool
should do to build up a nice translation memory database.
True, alignment is indeed a helpful
process, but it's often misused. I've encountered
many situations where new users (both freelance and
corporate) became so enamored with the idea of using
alignment to "magically" turn their existing
translation materials into one large translation memory,
that they spent days or weeks devoting their time
to this task and in the process became so frustrated
with the use of their new tool that they laid it aside
completely. The reason that alignment is often (and
correctly) perceived as a tedious process is its manual
nature. Although each of the alignment modules in
the above-mentioned tools applies well-chosen parameters
to the alignment "suggestions," they all
have to be verified, and -- as anyone knows who has
done alignment before -- often fixed. The parameters
are typically punctuation and paragraph markers, repetitions,
and non-linguistic matches such as numbers, abbreviations,
etc. This can go a long way toward making correct
matches, but it often requires user intervention.
Typical cases where manual changes are required are
differences in sentence delimitation (one sentence
in the source becomes several in the target or the
other way around), shifts in the order of segments,
different use and/or placement of footnotes, index
markers, etc.
With all these difficulties, why would
alignment still be a helpful process? Alignment can
be a very powerful tool if you have specific sets
of already translated documents that correspond closely
to new documents that now have to be translated. The
amount of time you can save and the level of consistency
and quality you can achieve by aligning the existing
documents and using that as the basis for your translation
can be immense, and there's simply no reason not to
go that route. But for other documents, unless you
can hire someone else to do mass alignment of existing
materials (someone with the odd combination of being
both cheap and well-qualified…), I would strongly
advise you to build up your translation memory database
by simply performing translation in the tool of your
choice and adding material to your translation memory
segment by segment.
© International Writers' Group. Excerpt
from the Tool Kit Newsletter, a biweekly newsletter
for people in the translation industry who want to
get more out of their computers. For more information
see www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit
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