Alignment is a way to reuse previous translations. It means that the original document and its translation are both segmented into translation units, and then the corresponding translation units are matched using statistical and linguistic algorithms. Being a complex process, it may take several minutes, depending on the length of the aligned documents. Although memoQ's automatic alignment is quite accurate, human revision is necessary for good results.

You can handle alignment on the LiveDocs ribbon tab of Project home. This is the place where you can set up a new LiveDocs corpus and add new alignment pairs to it. Through memoQ's unique LiveAlign™ technology, aligned document pairs can be used as a project resource directly, without prior human revision. However, you can still decide to perform the alignment and if you want, create a translation memory from it.

To start the alignment, create or select a LiveDocs corpus first. Then either add alignment pairs, or import two monolingual documents, then link them.

After importing a document pair, you can choose to align on the fly and proceed to translation directly. In this case, you can fix errors in the alignment by right-clicking on translation results coming from the aligned pair. There, select Show document. If you want to thoroughly review the alignment before translation, click View/Edit. In both cases, the alignment editor will open. This is the place where alignment results are revised, and inaccuracies are corrected. The alignment editor is another editor tab on memoQ main window.