ABBYY Aligner

The Ultimate Guide to Cross-Language Document Matching with ABBYY Aligner

ABBYY Aligner is a professional tool designed to align parallel texts in various languages to create Translation Memory ™ databases. By utilizing ABBYY’s advanced linguistic technology and dictionary databases, it accurately matches segments in source and translated texts to help language service providers and translators recycle previous work, significantly reducing translation costs while improving quality. Key Features and Benefits

ABBYY Aligner streamlines the creation of linguistic assets through several high-performance features:

Intelligent Matching: The software uses semantic proximity to find matching segments between source and target texts.

Wide Language Support: It supports 10 European languages (English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian) across 90 translation directions.

Batch Processing: Efficiently handles large volumes of documents, with support for files up to 10 MB each in batch mode.

Customizable Rules: Features an embedded database of text-splitting rules that users can extend with their own list of abbreviations.

Versatile Export: Saves results in TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) or RTF formats, ensuring compatibility with virtually all Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools. Supported File Formats

ABBYY Aligner is compatible with a broad range of document types to ensure flexibility in cross-language matching: Supported Formats Microsoft Office DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, PPS, PPSX, XLS, XLSX Standard Formats PDF, RTF, TXT, HTML, XML Other Support for pasting text directly from the Clipboard How the Alignment Process Works

To create a high-quality translation memory from existing documents, follow these core steps:

Import Documents: Load your original source document and its corresponding manually translated version.

Automatic Segmentation: The software automatically splits the text into sentences or segments based on its internal linguistic rules.

Review and Edit: Use the intuitive side-by-side interface to review the alignment. If segments are mismatched due to different sentence structures, you can manually disconnect and reconnect them to ensure accuracy.

Export Results: Save the final aligned text as a TMX file to import it into your preferred CAT tool, such as SDL Trados Studio or Memsource. Best Practices for Accurate Matching

Check Formatting: Alignment is easiest when source and target documents have similar layouts and structures.

Handle Complex Scripts: For documents with unclear fonts or special characters, you can integrate ABBYY FineReader to first perform high-accuracy OCR before starting the alignment process.

Use Online for Small Tasks: For quick results on small parallel texts (up to 50 rows), the ABBYY Aligner Online service provides a free, streamlined alternative for basic checking and exporting.