SDL Trados Studio Quick Tips: Using TMX Content in Trados Studio

If you have translation memories in TMX format that you'd like to use in SDL Trados Studio, this is how you can do it.

Option 1 - TMX imported into an existing translation memory

If you already have a Trados Studio translation memory (*.sdltm) that you would like to add the contents of the TMX file to, you can import the file by following one of the procedures below.

a. In the Translation Memories view, open your existing translation memory, and click Import, then follow the steps needed to select your TMX file.

b. If your TM is active in a project, you can also start the import process from Project Settings - All Language Pairs - Translation Memories and Automated Translation.

Option 2 - New translation memory created from TMX file

If you would like to create a completely new TM from your TMX file, you can directly "open" the TMX in SDL Trados Studio. This will automatically convert the TMX to a Trados TM, by first creating the TM and then importing the TMX into the newly created TM.

a. From the Translation Memories view, select Open, and select *.tmx from the file type dropdown list.

b. The same procedure can be launched from Project Settings - All Language Pairs - Translation Memories and Automated Translation by selecting Use - File-Based Translation Memory. When this is done from Project Settings, the TM will be added to the active project.

Adding Variables to a Studio TM to Increase Leverage

By adding variables to a SDL Trados Studio TM, we can customize our TM to recognize and automatically replace words, alphanumeric combinations and numbers that would otherwise need to be replaced manually.

In the example below, the only difference between these pairs of segments is X20™ and X40™.

Once the X20™ segments have been translated, a regular TM finds no matches or only fuzzy matches for the X40™ segments:

But by adding X20™ and X40™ to the TM Variables, these items will be recognized as non-translatable elements, and will therefore be replaced automatically.

To achieve this, we go into Project Settings > Language Pairs > All Language Pairs > Translation Memory and Automated Translation, select our main TM, and click on Settings:

Then go to Language Resources and select Variable List from the list on the right-hand side, then click Edit:

Add both X20™ and X40™ to the list and click OK:

Close all the open dialog boxes and go back to the file, where we now get this:

Note: For this to work, each of the segments that had been previously confirmed in this example had to be confirmed again, so that the segment variables could be processed with the newly modified TM and the variables could be recognized and automatically replaced. From here on, any new segments entered into the TM that have either X20™ or X40™ will be automatically processed with the new variables.

Any number of variables can be added to a TM. This also works for things like product names and numbers with hyphens, such as 1375-2, 1379-5, for example, that Studio would not normally recognize as numbers.

Variables can be added or deleted from a TM at any time.

A new OpenExchange app for Studio 2014 called Variables Manager now makes it easy to add long lists of variables quickly to a TM through a simple copy-paste operation.

Same Segment, Multiple Translations in Studio 2011

Unlike Trados 2007, Studio 2011 doesn't require a specific TM setting to store multiple translations for the same segment in the TM. All we need to know is the right keyboard shortcut when committing a new translation to the TM.

To store multiple translations for the same segment, simply use Ctrl+Alt+Up (Add as new translation) to commit the new translation to the TM. Note that this keyboard shortcut is user-changeable via Tools-Options-Keyboard Shortcuts-Editor > TM Window.

When a segment comes up for which there is more than one translation in the TM, simply use Alt+1, Alt+2, etc. to choose the relevant translation to populate the target segment.

Changing Segmentation in SDL Trados Studio 2011

For those occasions when Studio's standard segmentation won't do, the following steps will help you customize your file's segmentation to your liking.

 Let's say I have a source file that has tabs in it, like this simple Word file:

After adding my file to a project, and translating the first segment, it looks like this:

We can easily see that if the file were segmented differently, I would be able to leverage my translations much better, with each individual country name being on its own separate segment.

To achieve this, I go into Project Settings, then Translation Memory Settings:

In the window that opens, select Language Resources on the left, and then Segmentation Rules on the right, then click on Edit:

This brings up one more box. For this example, since I want Studio to create a new segment every time it finds a tab, I need to choose Add:

To create a segmentation rule based on tabs, I add a name (Tab), choose "Anything" in the "Before break" dropdown menu, "Tab" in the "Break characters" dropdown menu, and "Anything" in the "After break" dropdown menu:

 Click OK several times to close all the open dialog boxes.

Now I go back to my project, remove the Word file I was working on, add it again, prepare it, and this is what I see:

Much better!

From now on, whenever I use this TM, a new segment will be created  whenever there is a tab. If I want to remove this segmentation rule, I simply go back to the Segmentation Rules dialog box, select the rule I created and click on Remove.

This is a simple example using tabs, but Studio is powerful enough to provide a great range of possibilities by playing with the various options provided.