Making a translation memory out of two documents with YouAlign

We all know the Web is full of great sources to build a translation memory (TM). Of course, not every document available on the Web in two or more languages is reliable and worth integrating into a TM. But as soon as you have determined that the material is good for your purposes, you may want to store that material in your hard disk, and then you have another problem: How to make a TM out of it? There are many great solutions out there, and I just found another one reading Jost Zetzsche’s “Tool Kit” newsletter: YouAlign. This is simply an online document alignment solution designed to help those who need to quickly make a TM out of two texts with the same content in two languages. YouAlign aligns the two documents and puts each sentence in the source text side by side with its counterpart in the target text. The alignment is done at sentence level, so you may have to do some additional editing to adjust things properly beforehand (every good translator knows that sometimes the target text may have more or less sentences that the source, in order to achieve fluency).

Input files can be MS-Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, HTML, XML, Corel WordPerfect, RTF, Lotus WordPro and plain text. The output is a TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) file, which can be easily imported into your CAT tool, or used with a project on XBench to search for terminology.

YouAlign is a completely free tool. You don’t have to purchase any software or register. But be careful with what you upload and protect your (and your clients’!) sensitive information.

Also, beware of YouAlign‘s limitation: you can only upload files as big as 1MB or less.

Link:
YouAlign

Oh, by the way, fidusinterpres.com now has 3 additional language-specific RSS feeds and 3 additional e-mail newsletters: one for English, one for Portuguese and another one for German. So if you only want to read posts in one of those languages and ignore posts written in the other languages, feel free to usubscribe from the general feed/newsletter and subscribe to a language-specific one.