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What is alignment?

Alignment takes a source file, such as a Word document, plus a translated file. It then splits each file into segments such as sentences or phrases. Finally, it “aligns” source and target segments and tells which source sentence corresponds to which target sentence. The result is similar to a translation memory. The process sounds more trivial than it is. Often, one source sentence may map to two or more target sentences (e.g. if a long sentence was translated into multiple sentences). Off-the-shelf alignment tools do exist and they are very frequently used to convert existing translated content into translation memories. These can then be uploaded to the Beebox.