Importing and exporting translation memories

You can import a TM created outside Smartcat or provided by a cutomer, as a TMX, SDLTM (SDL Studio), or Excel file. 

Importing TM

1. Go to the Linguistic Assets tab, select translation memories, and open the translation memory you need by clicking on its name in the list. 
2. Click Overwrite/Update depending on what you are going to do.

Overwrite TM — This option will erase all the existing data in your TM and replace it with the data contained in the file that you are importing. This option can be used if you have exported the data in a previous operation and edited it outside Smartcat. By using this option, you will know that all the data is up to date.

Update TM — In this case, the data that you are importing will be added to the existing data. If you are importing segments that already exist in the TM, they will be ignored. 

3.  In the dialog box that opent click  Add to select a file you want to import then hit Import to start the process. Smartcat will display a message to indicate that the process is in progress and will notify you when it is over and if it encounters any errors. Tips: 
TMX files

It's important for a translation memory that you are going to enlarge to have the same language codes as the TMX file. Otherwise, the translation memory will not be extended. 

You can add the translation languages to a TM in Smartcat and then update it again - entries with new translation languages that have not been added will have now.

You can also adjust a language code in the TMX file  by opening it in a text editor you like, for example, Visual Studio Code, and replacing all instances of the language code with the one you need.

XLSX files

The first column of an XLSX file downloaded  should contain the source units, one per cell, while the second column (and the following ones, if this is a multilingual TM) should contain translations, one per cell corresponded to the source.

The upper cell of each column(language) should hold a language code, so in case you need to adjust a dialect, here’s the full list of language codes.

If a TM unit contains tags, it will look like this (the digit refers to the number of a tag).

Also, you may find in a file two additional columns entitled [Context: previous] and [Context: next], which contain the information about one preceding and one following entry. This information is used in Smartcat to track context matches.

You can download an existing TM in the XLSX format, which will give you a template. Then paste entries in the template that you want to upload in Smartcat and upload the file as described above.
 

Expporting TM

1. Go to the Linguistic Assets tab, select translation memories, and open the translation memory you need by clicking on its name in the list. 
2. Click Export. 
3. Choose to use default export settings or configure these yourself. The settings let you select the format of the exported file and whether to include tags or not.
4. Click Export again.