Experiences in computing alignments at the paragraph and sentence level within a project TRANSLEARN in the European Union``s "LRE" programme of research and development in language engineering are reported. About 98% of the sentences in pairs of corpora in different languages have been aligned correctly by a method that uses dynamic programming on numbers of characters per sentence. This paral-lels the experience of previous researchers for English-French alignment We have used Portuguese and Greek material in addition to these languages. from a set of 49 European Union official documents. It is argued that the key issue of automated alignment is now the automated improvement of the quality of alignment achieved by methods that rely only on character counts. Cues that are helpful to support such an improvement are identified: special words. cognates, syntactic fragments. and a simple measure of seman-tic weight. A short account of their use in experiments is given.