How to receive and use word alignment information

To receive alignment information, use the Azure AI Translator translate method and include the optional includeAlignment parameter.

Alignment information format

Alignment is returned as a string value of the following format for every word of the source. The information for each word is separated by a space, including for non-space-separated languages (scripts) like Chinese:

[[SourceTextStartIndex]:[SourceTextEndIndex]–[TgtTextStartIndex]:[TgtTextEndIndex]] *

Example alignment string: "0:0-7:10 1:2-11:20 3:4-0:3 3:4-4:6 5:5-21:21".

In other words, the colon separates start and end index, the dash separates the languages, and space separates the words. One word may align with zero, one, or multiple words in the other language, and the aligned words may be noncontiguous. When no alignment information is available, the Alignment element is empty. The method returns no error in that case.

Restrictions

Alignment is only returned for a subset of the language pairs at this point:

• from English to any other language;
• from any other language to English except for Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, and Latvian to English
• from Japanese to Korean or from Korean to Japanese You don't receive alignment information if the sentence is a canned translation. Example of a canned translation is This is a test, I love you, and other high frequency sentences.

Example

Example JSON

[
  {
    "translations": [
      {
        "text": "Kann ich morgen Ihr Auto fahren?",
        "to": "de",
        "alignment": {
          "proj": "0:2-0:3 4:4-5:7 6:10-25:30 12:15-16:18 17:19-20:23 21:28-9:14 29:29-31:31"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
]