Trados Sdltm

You can attach a Trados Studio Translation Memory (.sdltm file) directly to Supervertaler and consult it for matches – without exporting it to TMX first, and without closing Trados.

When to use this

The typical scenario: you’re translating a project in Trados Studio with a working TM. You’d like to consult that same TM from inside Supervertaler – maybe to use its concordance, run AI translations against it, or work on a different project that shares terminology with the Trados project. Rather than exporting to TMX every few minutes, you point Supervertaler at the .sdltm directly and let it stay in sync.

Attach a Trados TM

1. Open TMs → TM List.
2. Click 🔗 Attach Trados TM (next to 📥 Import TMX).
3. Pick the .sdltm file.
4. Confirm the dialog – it shows the TM’s languages, name, and translation-unit count.
5. Optionally edit the display name (defaults to the full filename including .sdltm so it’s easy to spot in the TM list).
6. Watch the progress dialog as Supervertaler mirrors the TUs (≈ 5 seconds for a 13 K-TU TM).

The TM is created read-only by default. Supervertaler never writes back to your .sdltm; that file remains the source of truth and stays under Trados’s exclusive control for writes.

How sync works

Once attached, the mirror stays in sync with the live .sdltm. Every 5 seconds Supervertaler checks the file’s modification time. When Trados saves a new or modified TU and the file timestamp changes, Supervertaler pulls in just the delta – not a full re-read – and updates the TM’s entry count automatically. The mtime check itself is essentially free, so idle ticks cost nothing.

You can keep working in Trados; new TUs you confirm there appear in Supervertaler within a few seconds.

Tag preservation

Trados-style inline tags are preserved as Supervertaler’s <N>...</N> markers on the way in:

Trados	Supervertaler
Start tag, ID 116	<116>
End tag, ID 116	</116>
Standalone tag, ID 12	<12/>

This is the same format Supervertaler uses when it imports SDLXLIFF segments directly, so a TM hit drops cleanly into the editor grid alongside your working segments.

The tag IDs in the TM hit won’t necessarily match the IDs in the segment you’re translating – TM <116> might be your current <11>. Structure (start/end pairs, count) is preserved, but you’ll still need to renumber tags on insertion if the IDs differ.

Refreshing manually

If you’d rather refresh on demand than rely on the 5-second timer, click 🔗 Attach Trados TM again on the same .sdltm. You’ll be asked “TM already attached – replace?”; click Yes and Supervertaler wipes the existing entries and re-mirrors from disk in one go.

Limitations

• Read-only: Supervertaler never writes back to the .sdltm. New translations you confirm in the Workbench go to your normal Supervertaler TMs, not back into the Trados file.
• Tag IDs differ: as noted above, the numeric IDs on tags in TM hits may differ from the IDs in your current segment. Tag structure is preserved.
• Match scores differ slightly: Supervertaler uses Python’s SequenceMatcher; Trados uses its own token-aligned algorithm. Ranking of matches is similar; exact percentages can be a few points apart.
• Concurrent use is safe: opening the .sdltm while Trados has it open is fine – Supervertaler reads via SQLite’s URI read-only mode, and Trados uses WAL.