Wordfast AutoAligner

Wordfast AutoAligner allows you to align source and target documents translated without a translation memory tool and create a translation memory.

How to use Wordfast AutoAligner

To align your source and target files using AutoAligner, follow these steps:

1. Using your browser, log in to (or create a new, free account at) Wordfast Anywhere at FreeTM.com.
2. Under the Wordfast Anywhere tab, click on the AutoAligner icon. This opens the Wordfast AutoAligner webpage.
3. Click on Add files and navigate to the source and target documents. Alternatively, you can drag-and-drop the files directly into the main box in the AutoAligner page.
4. If your documents are multilingual, tick the relevant check box. AutoAligner automatically detects the languages in your documents.
5. Click on Start upload.
6. When AutoAligner uploads and processes the files, it auto-detects the languages and displays the result.
7. You can swap the languages by clicking on the back-and-forth arrows in order to set the alignment language pair (source and target language).
8. Choose whether you want to download the TM immediately and/or receive it by email. You can also include formatting tags in the aligned segments if you want.
9. Click on Align! and let AutoAligner work.
10. The alignment process creates a zip file for you. Download it from AutoAligner or wait until you receive it by email (depending your what you selected in the previous step).
11. Extract (unzip) the zip file and you will get:
    • An automatically created TM in the TXT file format for Wordfast Classic or Wordfast Anywhere.
    • An automatically created TM in the TMX file format that can be imported into Wordfast Pro and most third-party TM tools.
    • An Excel (*.xls) file with the automatically aligned segments. You can edit the Excel file if the automatic result isn't good enough. After you edit it, go to the Tools tab in AutoAligner and upload the edited Excel file to convert it to a TM. Note that it creates the TM in the TXT file format.[1]

When appending an aligned TM to a Wordfast Pro TM, you need to make sure the TM language codes match the TM. Wordfast AutoAligner uses generic source and target language codes like EN, FR, DE, etc. and not variant specific codes like EN-US, FR-FR, DE-CH, etc. For example, if you have a FR-FR to EN-US TM on Wordfast Pro, you will not be able to import a FR to EN aligned TM from AutoAligner into it. To do so, first open the TXT TM and perform the necessary find/replace (match case and whole words only) with matching destination TM codes.

References

1. If you need a TMX file, you can upload the TXT file as a TM to Wordfast Anywhere and download it as a TMX file.