I am a SDLX user who received, as part of the 2006 release, Trados and Multiterm. I am in the process of learning about these parts of the package. Although I am not ready to move to Trados for my translations, I concluded that there are enough advantages to Multiterm that I should migrate to it right away. Fuzzy searching is just one of Multiterm’s advantages compared with SDLX Termbase.

As you may know, you can turn on the Multiterm toolbar in SDLX Edit (View > Toolbars > Multiterm). You have essentially the same functions as before, but supported by Multiterm rather than SDLX Termbase.

I can imagine that many other users are in this situation, so I created this document to help. Here are the steps I followed for my migration.

1. Install Multiterm. It is available as a download from your login page on SDL’s site. It is a separate installation from SDLX and Trados.

2. Run the training tutorials that came with Multiterm to get some background. Read the manual if you want more detail.

3. Obtain the SDLMultiTermConvertPluginSDLTermbase plugin from SDL customer support. (Strangely, I found nothing on the SDL site about this very powerful tool.) It is provided in a zip archive. Copy the two files extracted from the archive to your Multiterm Convert plugins folder, which is probably:
C:\Program Files\TRADOS\MultiTerm\Convert\Plugins

4. Run Multiterm Convert. In step 3, conversion options, you should now have a “SDL Termbase Desktop Format” button since you installed the plugin. This process will create three output files: xml, xdt and log.

5. I had to correct sublanguage entries in my SDLX files (see the SDL support database, answer ID's 530 and 689). It’s too bad: this is something that could have been implemented to work automatically in the plugin or in Multiterm Convert.

This involves directly editing the xml file you created above. Run Word and drag the xml file to the title bar. This will open the file.

I had a special situation. My SDLX Termbase was set to use English (US) and French (France), since generic languages do not exist in SDLX. I wanted to take advantage of generic languages in Multiterm, and so I modified the file to reflect that. Obviously, editing of XML files should be approached with care.

In my case, I did global replaces of the following four strings in the xml file (see step 6 for related details):

English (United States) -> English
EN-US -> EN
French (France) -> French
FR-FR -> FR

If you are not using generic languages, or your language pairs are different from mine, you may need to modify the XML to reflect your situation. The basic principle is to use Multiterm’s standard codes, which are not necessarily the same as those in your SDLX Termbase. See the SDL support database, mentioned above.

6. In Multiterm, under the Termbase menu, execute Create Termbase. This is the moment when you define the languages (generic or otherwise) in your new termbase. (Use the “show sublanguages” checkbox in step 3 of the wizard.) In my case, I created a termbase using a “multilingual glossary” template. I added generic languages for French and English, plus the US and British dialects of English.

Then execute Import Entries. Your “import file” will be the xml file you just modified. I had to set “fast import” in step 2 of the import wizard. (Perhaps there is another way to do it, but this worked well for me.)

This is a good moment to take a close look at your data and do a little housekeeping. In particular, since I had imported everything as generic, I needed to see if certain terms should be assigned to a dialect of English.

Best wishes for a successful migration!