OpenExchange Apps for TM Management

I organized all my OpenExchange apps (and some other utilities) neatly the other day in the Welcome view of Studio using the Menu Maker app (see Figure 1 below). While doing so, I realized that I don’t actually remember what some of them do, so I thought I would organize them in my mind as well (which is a much more difficult task). Anyhow, I collected all the TM management-related apps into a table and drew a diagram that would show me at a glance what they do and how they are related to each other. I found that very helpful for myself so I thought to share it here as well…

Figure 1. SDL OpenExchange apps and other programs organized in the Welcome screen of Trados Studio 2014 using the Menu Maker app.

Figure 2. TM management-related apps and their main conversion functions. For details, see the table below.

Here are some additional details about the apps mentioned in the above diagram:

App name	Conversion function	Notes
SDLTMExport	SDLTM > TMX
SDL Translation Memory Management Utility	SDLTM > TMW	Reverses language pairsRemoves duplicates
SDLTmConvert	SDLTM > SDXLIFF / XML / TMX / CSV / monolingual source and target text files	Includes filtering options Allows splitting output into several files Allows hiding and setting  user and system info Allows manipulation of tagged content Free limited version, unlimited paid version (35 euros)
SDLXliff2Tmx	SDLXLIFF > TMX / tab delimited TXT	Includes filtering options Allows removal of formatting tags
SDLTmReverseLangs	SDLTM <> SDLTM	Reverses languages
TM Merge	Merges SDLTMs into one SDLTM	Also creates additional language pairs from the available languages in the input TMs Cost: 48 euros

In addition to the TM conversion apps listed above, there are also several other TM management-related apps. I couldn’t come up with a pretty diagram for them, so I just list them here (all are free unless otherwise indicated):

TM Optimizer	Optimizes Trados Workbench TMs for use with Trados Studio by removing excessive formatting tags from the TM thus increasing the TM leverage. Cost: £50-100.
SDLTmFindVars	Identifies potential variables (untranslated text) in translation memories and allows the user to add them as variables to a Studio TM.
SDLTM Repair	Fixes specific errors in damaged Studio TMs.
Variables Manager for SDL Trados Studio	Allows fast editing, copying, importing and exporting variable lists in Studio TMs.
TMX Anonymizer	Anonymizes TMX files by resetting the Creation User and Change User name fields.

These tables and graphs help me to keep track of the various apps and their functions. It’s good to know what kind of apps are available because you never know when you might need them.