Prerequisites
In order to do the following exercise you need to have installed TRADOS MultiTerm iX or MultiTerm 7, Microsoft Excel and a file extraction program (e.g. WinZip, WinRar, etc.) on your computer. You also need to have done the previous exercise "II. Creating a new terminology database in MultiTerm".
Outline of this exercise
To illustrate the steps of this exercise we have included several screenshots featuring TRADOS MultiTerm iX. However, you can still complete this exercise whilst working with MultiTerm 7, since the layout of the application has only been slightly changed and the steps and processes are pretty much the same.
On completion of this exercise, you should be able to:
- Convert an Microsoft Excel table containing terminological data into MultiTerm-XML format
- Define the settings for importing data into a MultiTerm termbase
- Import the MultiTerm-XML file into the termbase created in the previous exercise and merge its entries with the ones you may have created
- Export the newly-merged termbase in MultiTerm XML-format
Preparing your working environment
Often in translation practice translators and translation agencies receive specific terminology from clients – for instance in form of Excel tables – to be used in the translation process. In these cases, translators can either a) enter the terms manually in termbases, or b) import them automatically into termbases. In the present exercise we will simulate the second scenario and we will import a bilingual glossary saved as an Excel table in a previously-created empty MultiTerm termbase.
Before starting, prepare your working environment. Use the same folder structure as in the previous exercise – in our example:
My Documents/Terminology_Management/Termbases/TDB
Download the file called "Importing.zip" from the link below and save it in the TDB folder. Extract the files from the folder Importing, so that the folder structure remains the same. You should now be able to see two sub-folders called Excel_Tables and Final_Export. In the first one, Excel_Tables, you will find several sub-folders containing Excel files named according to the languages of their contents – e.g. "EN-DE.xls" contains terminology in English and German. English will be always the source language and for this exercise you can choose German, Estonian, French, Italian, Romanian or Slovenian as target language. The second folder, Final_Export, is empty but do not worry: you will need it later.
Importing Terminology
Several steps are required in order to import terminology into MultiTerm. First of all, the Excel table has to be converted into the MultiTerm preferred format. The Excel table you will import should now be located in your working directory:
MyDocuments/Terminology_Management/Termbases/TDB/Importing/Excel_Tables
Choose one of the Excel files that matches the language pair you used to create your empty termbase in the previous exercise ("II. Creating a new terminology database in MultiTerm"). In our example we chose the Excel file "EN-SL.xls" containing a bilingual glossary for English and Slovenian.
The table contains only two columns with the terms in each language. The headings of each column – which are the languages English and Slovenian in our example – should correspond exactly to the field names in your MultiTerm termbase – this can only be true if you created index fields for English and for the second language in your empty database.