our blog

How to remove the illegal index in Trados 2007

11 February 2025

A post about how to get rid of a prehistoric error in a prehistoric program

* * *

When the Illegal index message appears in the Translator’s Workbench window, restart the program immediately, even if it works just fine.

This usually happens after numerous openings and closings of the translation memory or crashes. It means a breach of some index file (IIX, MDF, MTF, or MWF) structure. It is serious, and you should better reopen the memory (the index files are updated during closings) or be ready to lose it.

If the message reappears even after the memory is reopened, export it to a TMX file, create a new memory with the same language direction, and import the TMX file to it.

* * *

The Trados 2007 software package, which used to include Translator’s Workbench, is a dinosaur. But it still works, can be used to translate efficiently, and its developer has not opened its source code yet.

 

See more interesting posts in our Telegram channel.

Recommended content

About the differences between human and machine translation
Semi-philosophical note 1. Translation is technically sense rendering. 2. Machines are unable to operate senses. Conclusion: machine translation is no translation. “Machine translation” is an oxymoron: translation cannot be done by a machine. If it is performed by a machine, it is no translation; if it is performed by a human, it is not machine […]
Knowledge Hub

How to remove the “The translation memory … could not be opened” error in Trados Studio
What danger lies in clouds When several translators are working on a big project simultaneously, it seems very alluring to put the translation memory in some cloud, connect all the vendors to it, and the translations of one of them will be immediately available to all the others as if working with a server or […]
Knowledge Hub

The Philippines and the Spanish language
Linguogeographic notes In 1542, two islands of the archipelago, which would receive the name of the Philippines later,—Leyte and Samar—were named Felipinas after Philip (Felipe) II, the king of Spain at that time. After that, the name of “the Philippines” (Las Islas Filipinas) was extended to the whole archipelago. Up to 1989, for almost 400 years, the Philippines have […]
Knowledge Hub

How to get rid of the “Attempted to divide by zero” error in MultiTerm
This error appears not only in Trados Studio We wrote about the Attempted to divide by zero error in Trados Studio before, and now it has been caught by MultiTerm, a free app for processing termbases. The error appears right during simple scrolling through term records. What causes this error, typically, is unknown, but it […]
Knowledge Hub

How to translate TXLF Wordfast files in Trados Studio
Trados Studio can be used to translate .txlf Wordfast files If you do not have or do not like or do not work in Wordfast, you can translate its files in Trados Studio. Trados Studio knows well how to process different file types (Word, Excel, HTML and many, many others). To teach your Trados Studio to work with TXLF Wordfast files means to […]
Knowledge Hub