Importing terminology into a TermStar NXT dictionary

In our previous post, we showed you how to create a database and a dictionary within the database. In this post, we will look at how to import terminology into a dictionary created within a TermStar NXT database. You may receive terminology in several different formats. With TermStar, you can work with a variety of formats, for example, MARTIF, TBX and TMX, as well as customised formats such as Excel files. This post covers how to import terminology from a TBX file.

Importing terminology from a TBX file

Step 1: Select Dictionaries > Import Terminology from the Resource Bar and then select the appropriate option. As we are importing terminology from a TBX file, we will select MARTIF/TBX for importing terminology into a dictionary that we have previously created (please refer to our previous post on Creating terminology databases and dictionaries with TermStar).

Step 2: Now click on the Browse button to select the TBX file that you wish to import into TermStar. For the purposes of this post, we have used an English-Spanish TBX terminology file from Microsoft (source: http://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Terminology.aspx).

Step 3: Then click on the Next button and select the dictionary from the database that has already been created. Let's assume that this database is called Test and the dictionary created within it is called Test_TBX. Select Test_TBX and then click on the Next button. If you haven't already created a database/dictionary, you also have the option to do that now by clicking on the New button, as shown in the following image:

Step 4: As we are importing this terminology into an empty dictionary for the first time, select Append all data records, click on Next and then on Finish. If you were adding terminology to a pre-existing dictionary that already contained terminology, you could select one of the other two options (for more information on these three options, please read the description given in the lower half of the screenshot).

Step 5: You will now see the Import window and the progress bar of the import. Once the TBX terminology file has been imported into the TermStar database, the Import window will display the Completed successfully message, as shown in the image below:

You have successfully imported terminology from a TBX file into a TermStar dictionary, meaning that you can now use this dictionary in your translation projects. To open the dictionary and see the imported terms, select Dictionary > Open Dictionary from the Resource Bar, then select the dictionary into which you imported the terminology. In our example, we will select the Test_TBX dictionary (as shown in the image below), as we imported the terminology into this dictionary:

If you wish to add this dictionary to the project you are currently working on, select the Add dictionary to the current project option (your project must be open for this to be done) as shown in the above image. Your imported terminology appears in TermStar NXT, as shown in the image below. Remember to select the correct source and target language from View > Display Languages in order to see all the imported terms (this is usually selected by default, but you may want to select the correct source and target language for multilingual dictionaries).

This same procedure also applies to MARTIF or TMX files. In just a few simple steps, you can therefore import MARTIF, TBX and TMX files into your TermStar database, ready to be used in your projects. We hope you find this post useful! Please send us your feedback or comments and questions. Stay tuned for our next post in which we will see how to import terminology from customised file formats such as Excel files.