If you already work with SDL Trados Studio, you are certainly familiar with packages, their importing into the application, and creating the return package. Convenient, inconvenient – well, opinions vary.
The standard Studio package contains files type, project file, source files for translation (SDLXLIFF), reference material, and translation memories.
Sometimes it may be useful to extract only some data from the package without importing it into the Studio.
The package is in fact a standard ZIP file. All you need to do to be able to handle the contents is to rename the package file extension to ZIP, or to open the package with WinZip (or any other compression software supporting ZIP files).
Once you do this, you may extract references, translation memories, etc. directly. It is that simple.