Changing Trados translation memory and TagEditor languages

This post will explain how to change languages of the Trados TM and TagEditor files (SDL Trados 2007 and earlier). There are various scenarios that may require changing the languages. For example, languages of Trados TM do not match languages of the TTX file, which prevents from editing the TTX. Since Trados does not offer any native function to achieve this, you may use the workaround described below.

Changing TagEditor file languages

Let’s assume we have Czech – English (US) translation project. The language codes are “EN-US” for English and “CS” for Czech (you may find ISO language codes in this file). We want to change “EN-US” to “EU-UK” to set the Czech – English (UK) language pair.

  1. Open the TagEditor file (TTX) in plain text editor, such as Windows Notepad or PSPad.
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  3. In Notepad, search for TargetLanguage=”EN-US”. Replace “EN-US” with “EN-UK“.
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  5. Continue searching the file for Lang=”EN-US” and replace every occurrence with Lang=”EN-UK” (usually Ctrl+H and select “Replace All”). Please note, you may change both languages. Follow the same procedure and replace the second language code (in this example, lang=”CS”). In this case, you would also have to change SourceLanguage=”CS” to SourceLanguage=”required language code.
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  7. Save and close the TTX.

When you open the file in TagEditor, you will see appropriate language pair loaded.

Notes:

  1. This simple procedure cannot be used for “reversing” language pair, e.g. from CS-EN(US) to EN(US)-CS.
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  3. Make sure you use correct language codes.

Changing translation memory file languages

This procedure is somewhat more difficult. Let’s assume we have the EN(US)-CS language pair, which we want to change to German (DE-DE)-Czech (cs-CZ).

  1. Open the translation memory in Translator’s Workbench. Select File > Export to export the TM into the TMX format.
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  3. Open the TMX file in plain text editor, such as Windows Notepad or PSPad.
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  5. In Notepad, search for srclang= (in header) and set appropriate source language code here (in our example, we have to change srclang=”EN-US” to srclang=”DE-DE”.
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  7. Continue searching the file for lang=”EN-US” and replace every occurrence with lang=”DE-DE” (usually Ctrl+H and select “Replace All”). Please note, you may change both languages. Follow the same procedure and replace the second language code (in this case, lang=”cs-CZ”).
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  9. Save and close the TMX.
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  11. In Translator’s Workbench, create a new translation memory with a correct language pair; in our example, German-Czech.
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  13. Select File > Import in the Workbench and import the modified TMX.
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  15. The new translation memory now has correct languages and contains all translation units, which were stored in the original TM.

Notes:

  1. This simple procedure cannot be used for “reversing” language pair, e.g. from CS-EN(US) to EN(US)-CS.
  2.  

  3. Make sure you use correct language codes.

Important: Please note that language codes used in TagEditor files and TMX files differ. For example, code for Czech is “CS” in TagEditor, while “cs-CZ” is used in TMX files. To obtain a correct language code for TMX file, I recommend this procedure: (1) Create an empty translation memory in Translator’s Workbench with appropriate language pair. (2) Export this TM into TMX file. (3) Open TMX in Notepad and find the required language code.

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