Tips

Like any other serious CAT tool, Trados Studio helps you to simplify your work by allowing you to search in the concordance—i.e., in the translation memory attached to a Trados Studio project you work on. A special shortcut for this feature exists: F3 key. (By the way, it is the same in the ancient Trados 2007.) So, you need to select a word or several words you want to find in the TM(s) and press F3. In the Concordance Search Window, you see the results of searching.

But there is an inconvenience: when you select a fragment in your target text and press F3, the search is automatically performed in the target part of the TM, while, in most cases, you need to search in the source part. And you have to switch the search line to the Source manually.

But there is a shortcut for searching in the source too: CTRL+F3! (It was missing in Trados 2007: you could search in the source ONLY there.)

A Wordfast TM file has .txt extension. Actually, it is an usual .txt file delimited with tabs in a special way. Converting it into TMX format that allows TM exchange between all other CAT tools can be done in several ways. The easiest and quickest way involves Xbench (either free or paid version).

Step 1: Load your Wordfast TM into Xbench. There is a special file type Wordfast Memory there:

Do not forget to set the checkbox Ongoing translation.

Step 2: In Xbench, select Tools > Export Items, or simply press CTRL + R.

Export Items dialog box appears. Specify the settings in Output section: what languages are considered to be source and target, and the path and the file name for the .tmx file of the TM.

Press OK button. The .tmx file you get is the converted Wordfast TM.

Passolo files (they have tbulic extension) are not convenient for some operations: it is not easy to add the translations they contain to the existing Trados translation memory, to perform QA in Xbench etc. Free Passolo Translator's Edition does not allow that at all; Professional version allows them, but the export procedure is rather complicated.

The export of translations from Passolo file becomes possible with a help of auxiliary macros, attachable to the program.

By default, the macros files are downloadable from here:
http://translation-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Passolo.zip

To enable macros for export in Passolo, please perform the following steps:

Unpack the archive and copy .bas files it contains,

• PslAutoProjectFromFolder.bas
• TEK_Passolo2TMX.bas
• TEK_Passolo2Xliff.bas
• TEKPassolo2TTX.bas

to the Passolo macros folder. The path can be different depending on your Passolo and Windows version, for example:

Windows Vista/7/8:

• c:\Users\Public\Documents\Passolo Translator\2011\Macros\
• c:\Users\Public\Documents\Passolo Essential 2011\Macros\
• c:\Users\Public\Documents\Passolo 2011\Macros\

Windows XP:

• C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Passolo Translator\2011\Macros

etc.

Now you can export the translation from Passolo into text format.

In Passolo, press CTRL + M or select Tools > Macros. The dialog window Macros appears. It contains macros beginning from TEK...

— TEK_Passolo2TTX.bas macro is for exporting text into TagEditor (TTX) format.

Note: When you try to open the resulting .ttx file in TagEditor, the message about missing .ini file appears. You can choose any .ini file from the existing ones. Changing .ini file affects nothing, because the text is already segmented.

— TEK_Passolo2TMX.bas macro is for exporting text into TMX format.

— TEK_Passolo2Xliff.bas macro is for exporting text into XLIFF format.

To run a macro, select the necessary one in the list and press Run button. The resulting file with exported text is created in the folder where the original .tbulic Passolo file is stored.

Usual Trados 2007 translation memory (aka TM) consists of five files: .tmw container and four additional files with extensions iix, mdf, mtf and mwf.

Sometimes glitches happen with such 5-file TMs. With 95 % probability, you can restore them using the algorithm described below.

First thing to do is performing so called “reorganization”. This operation re-creates the index TM files.

In Translator's Workbench, select File > Reorganise:

Wait for completion of the reorganization (it lasts for several minutes in big TMs) and then try to work with the TM as usual.

If the reorganization does not help, export the TM to TMX, then create new TM with the same language direction in Trados 2007 and import the TMX into it.

If the TM does not allow neither to perform reorganization, nor to export/import segments, sometimes the following trick helps.

• Create an empty TM with the same name, the same language direction and the same custom fields structure.
• Close this TM in Translator's Workbench.
• Replace .tmw file of the new empty TM with the .tmw files of the corrupted TM.
• Open the resulting TM in Translator's Workbench (usually, it opens safely) and try to export its segments to TMX.
• If the export fails, try to reorganize the ТМ and then to export it again.
• I the reorganizations fails, too, try to add several new segments into the TM via “usual translation” and then to reorganize and export the segments once again.

If, after all these efforts, the TM still does not work, hence, the SDL itself is hardly able to help :(