Statistical, linguistic, and heuristic clues can be used for the alignment of words and multi-word units in parallel texts. This article describes the clue alignment approach and the optimization of its parameters using a genetic algorithm. Word alignment clues can come from various sources such as statistical alignment models, co-occurrence tests, string similarity scores and static dictionaries. A genetic algorithm implementing an evolutionary procedure can be used to optimize the parameters necessary for combining available clues. Experiments on English/Swedish bitext show a significant improvement of about 6% in F-scores compared to the baseline produced by statistical word alignment.Most of the work described in this paper was carried out at the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University. I would like to acknowledge technical and scientific support by people at the department in Uppsala.