There are two simple strategies to improve the quality of alignment:
- Upload legacy translation memories to the Beebox
- Upload dictionaries (word lists) to the Beebox
Legacy translation memories
Use of legacy translation memories can improve alignment quality.
The classic approach is using legacy TMs to recover translations: Submit source content and recover translated content by leveraging the TMs. This rarely works well even when the TMs were used to translate all your content. The reason is potential segmentation and markup differences between legacy translation tools and the Beebox.
The Beebox approach is different: Extract translations directly from the translated files and align these with the source content. The TMs are solely used to more reliably extract the translations directly from the files.
To upload your TMs, select your Beebox project and click “Resources” in the left navigation menu:
Upload a TM:
- Click the Add a resource link at the bottom and type a name for your TM
- Click the Upload link and follow instructions.
- The TM is shown in this screen. Note that the Pretranslation use option must be ticked.
Dictionaries
If you do not have legacy memories you should consider uploading terminology databases instead. This can substantially enhance the alignment algorithm itself. It makes sense even when you do have legacy memories. There are 3rd party tools to create terminology databases: Google for “Bilingual term extraction”.
To upload a terminology database, follow the same instructions as in the previous chapter. Then tick the Alignment dictionary option:
To view and manage your alignment dictionaries, click the Alignment dictionaries tab on the page:
