Cursor — AI code editor
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Example
English and French word alignment
See how “Hello world” maps to “Bonjour le monde” word by word: a simple bilingual alignment diagram for learners and teachers.
What this example shows
Two short sentences sit one above the other, and a colored line joins each English word to its French match. “Hello world” becomes “Bonjour le monde”. Most words pair off one to one, with a single spot where one English word answers to two French words. It is the plainest form of word alignment and a good first template.
Word by word
Each English word and the French it links to:
- Hello Bonjour
- A clean one-to-one match: one word links to one word.
- world le monde
- One English word answers to two French tokens, the article “le” and the noun “monde”. The connector fans out to both.
One word, two tokens
French often needs an article where English does not. “world” maps to “le monde”, so the link from a single English word reaches two French boxes. Both share one color, which marks them as one correspondence. This is the same grouping the tool uses whenever several words on one side answer to one word on the other.
Recreate it in the editor
Open the example, then swap in your own language pair, add a gloss or IPA line, or change the link colors. Export the result as PNG, SVG, or PDF for a handout or a post. If you add a gloss line, the grammatical labels follow a standard set.
For those labels:
See also
Related alignments in other examples:
- Japanese, Chinese, and English word order shows connectors that cross when the verb and object swap.
- French clitic pronouns shows reordering between French and English inside one short clause.
- Hebrew and Arabic with English adds right-to-left lines to the same idea.
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