Rainbow is part of a large framework, mostly composed of command-line tools. Fortunately, this one offers a proper graphical user interface. Just download, extract and run it – no installation required. Better still, it works on PC, Mac and Linux out of the box, so no body is left out for once.

The software offers a lot of features, but I first found about it when I was looking for a good and free term extractor. These are surprisingly rare to come by. In general, you would either need to pay a rather expensive price or use online tools with limited features.

The great thing about Okapi Rainbow’s term extraction feature is that it does accept various input formats (.xliff, .doc, .xls, etc.) and offers all the basic features you would expect from such a tool: min/max number of occurrences, stop words and so on. If you use a good list of stop words – you can find them easily for any language with a search engine -, you will be able to quickly build glossaries for your large or collaborative projects.

The output format is a plain tab-delimited text file. You can very easily copy or open it in Excel and organize data from there. Simple, fast, efficient.

But the term extraction feature is just a small part of the software. I previously mentioned the software accepts various input formats, it can also output them as .tmx files, just as XBench.

Speaking of which, Rainbow also offers a QA module. Some of its options are still experimental, which is why I still rely on XBench, but it looks very promising. Since images can speak more than words, just see for yourself, these are the options available for just one tab of the QA module:

Currently, Okapi Rainbow can also perform mass search/replace tasks for different file formats, create translation kits, compare translations, pre-translate files, etc. It is worth spending a bit of time to explore the different features and single out the ones that can help you.

Okapi Rainbow is free, multi-platform, open source and still being developed. Give it a little extra time, and it may well become XBench’s successor for all your file conversion and QA tasks!

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Which software shall I use to edit TMX files, then?

My personal recommendation goes to Olifant, which is pretty easy to use: source on the left, target on the right. Editing is simple and you have access to powerful options to import/export files, search specific strings using advanced filters, etc. You can also easily split or join strings, modify the language codes for your TM and modify attributes.

In short, it lets you to pretty much anything with your TMX files, which you can them easily import back in your CAT tool.

The interface itself is quite light and reactive, which is a big advantage over Trados Studio’s TM Editor windows.

To top it all, Olifant is absolutely free! You have no excuse for not giving it a try.

Any alternatives?

If the interface of Olifant scares you a bit, you may give a try to another TMX editor that is now free: Heartsome TMX Editor 8. You can see a short introduction video, and you will find a lot of practical articles on the download link. Besides TMX editing features, Heartsome TXM Editor 8 offers a number of QA checking options (Target identical to source, numerical mismatch, etc.)

While I don’t have much experience using it, it should get the work done for your TM editing tasks, and may even serve as a free QA tool for your projects.

Closing lines

So which TMX editor should you be using? I think both software are pretty complementary. Olifant gives you some really powerful options to search strings, but regular expressions and the like can be tricky to apply well. Heartsome TXM Editor 8 is a bit more straightforward, and should do just what you want it to in most cases.

Since they’re both free, my best advice is to give them both a try, and then decide on which of them fits your needs best.

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If you work with such files and want to import them in Trados, or at least put them in an exploitable format, you can do it in a pretty straightforward way with XBench.

1. If your Excel file has more than two columns, remove everything not necessary and just make sure you have source in column A and original translation in B

2. Save your Excel file as a Tab-delimited text file (.txt). You should be able to find it in the Save as… options

3. Open XBench, start a project and make sure to add your freshly created .txt file to the project

4. Still in XBench, go to Tools, then Export Items… There, choose TMX memory as the format, choose a name and location for the exported file and don’t forget to add a source and a target language in the list using the same code Trados would use (for example EN-US or EN-GB). You can do a bit of filtering here if you’d like, otherwise just leave the other options as they are

5. That’s it! Now you should be able to import the .tmx translation memory into Trados and other tools that support this format

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To do this easy, I highly recommend Olifant, a free .NET application that allows you to manage your translation memories easily. Just open your TM file (.tmx for Trados), and you will have a two-column interface to edit the contents of your file. It also makes it easy to copy and paste texts into another software, if you want to use an external spell checker for example (it is what I usually do when I translate .ttx files with lots of locked segements, getting only the text added to the TM in Olifant makes it easy to extract the texts I did translate).

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