Translation tool compatiblity is a wide subject. We can approach it from the point of view of translation memories (e.g. "are Wordfast and Trados TMs compatible?"), of the document being translated, of language compatibility (e.g. "is Japanese support in Wordfast compatible with that of D?jàVu?"), of glossaries, etc.

We will treat the subject of Translation memories, work documents (the documents you translate) and glossaries.

1. Translation memories.

Thank Heaven, there is a universal TM format these days, and it?s called TMX. It is meant to exchange TMs between translation tools with minimal loss. One should note that almost any format conversion inevitably leads to some loss of some sort; when two tools are considered "compatible", it simply means the losses when going from one to the other are negligible.

In essence, use one translation tool, export the translation memory as "TMX", then open it with the other tool. It should be as simple as that, and usually is.

Remarks:

With Wordfast:

- to import a TMX file, simply "open" it, that is, in Wordfast/Translation memories, use the "Select TM" button.

- to export the current TM to TMX: In Wordfast 4, click the "Export" button in Wordfast/Translation memories. The current "foobar.txt" TM will be exported as "foobar.tmx". In Wordfast 5, use the TM/Glossary editor > Tools > Special filters > Export to TMX.

To export a TM to the TMX format in Trados, use the File/Export menu, say "OK" in the first dialog box if you want to export the entire TM, select the "TMX" format in the "Save as type" list in the last dialog box named "Create export file", then export.

Importing is a little trickier but poses no problem, once you know what follows. Basically, Trados does not "Open" a TMX file, but "Imports" it into an existing TM. So you would first need to create a new TM (or open an existing one) and import the TMX file into it.

Possible problems:

This is the major cause of TMX incompatibly when importing into Trados. ISO language codes have evolved through the ages, so language codes may not be matching between what the TMX files has and what Trados expects the TMX file to have as language codes. This is enough to make Trados walk out: it will not pop up a warning with a possible language code conversion. It just quits.

Workaround:

1. Create a new, empty Trados TM with the required language codes.
2. Populate it with at least one new segment.
3. Export it from Trados as TMX
4. Open that TMX with Ms-Word (see note on opening XML with Ms-Word). Look at language codes in a TU: here they are, the way Trados wants them.
5. Open the other TMX (the one you want to import into Trados) with Ms-Word to search-replace the language codes so you end up with the proper ones. When doing a search-replace, use the quotes around the language codes, and use the "Match case" options, to make sure you will not accidentally replace text within segments.

Trados may reject a TU if the target segment is empty, or if it contains only characters that Trados "thinks" do not constitute a valid segment. The problem is, Trados usually cancels the entire import if only one TU is not valid. This can be extremely frustrating. You would need to open the TMX file, for example with Ms Word (see note on opening XML with Ms-Word), and locate the "invalid" TU, which can be time-consuming. A typically invalid TU usually has an empty target segment, or one containing only a full stop, or a number. as in the following example:

<tu creationdate="20010911T203505Z" creationid="ME" usagecount="0">
<tuv lang="EN-US">
<seg>Some source text here.</seg>
</tuv>
<tuv lang="FR-FR">
<seg>.</seg>
</tuv>
</tu>