Idea Delivered

This has now been delivered with SDL Trados Studio 2019 SR1.

Rework of the Alignment Tool

The alignment tool in Studio is simply useless from the very first version until today. Switching from SDLX with its intuitive and simple alignment tool to Studio was a pain. And a Retroit batch task added in Studio 2015 is also useless now due to some major flaws of the aligner. To create a TM from two files most of us now have to use third party apps like ABBYY Aligner (great tool, by the way). So how to improve the aligner? Just use the SDLX or ABBYY tool as an example:

- Rework the editing interface: connecting segments with “strings” is a bad idea, just use “blocks” as in SDLX. Now, when scrolling the alignment interface down, “strings” are changing their form and it is confusing to find out what sentences are aligned together.

- Remove any restrictions for merging segments: allow to merge any amount of blocks in source/target and edit them.

- Improve auto alignment engine: ABBYY Aligner is much better in auto alignment now and you do not need to perform a lot of editing.

There are also many other ways to improve the aligner, but new interface without “strings” and restrictions could at least make the tool usable.

Roman Shchadnov

  • Some additions (which were available in WinAlign) to the other suggestions in this post:

    - Add buttons for 'Confirm up to active unit' and 'Re-align from active unit'.

    - Add buttons to enable scrolling the two languages separately (e.g. alphabetic definitions in a text).

    - Add button to confirm a selection of segments (and allow to select segments first).

  • I am still using the excellent alignment tool SDL Align Application 2007 SP3 which is an amazing tool, simple to use, very efficient, I am aligning huge texts in a few minutes, provided I checked the source files before to eliminate boxes or items that would trouble the process. I have been careful to keep this tool active every time I am upgrading, as the new alignment tool never reached the level of convenience of the old tool.

  • I totally agree! The alignment editor is a joke! Its jerky jumping can be probably even dangerous for epileptic people...

    That jerky moves are apparently caused by row heights being based on identically numbered segments (which gets assigned before the actual alignment) instead on segments ACTUALLY ALIGNED together. I believe that fixing this single thing will drastically improve the UX.

    Performance is less than poor - using the editor in the edit mode (usign check boxes) is basically impossible, unless one is VERY patient and has a LOT of time on his hands.

    And yes, I have run into the 3-segments limitation several times too.