MultiTerm can export the structure of a termbase to an xdt file, and the content to an mtf.xml file. A combination of these two files is a common way to send around termbases, since they are considerably smaller than an sdltb file.

 

You can create such a pair by selecting MultiTerm xdt + xml as the output format in the settings. 

For converting from xml, drag and drop an xdt file, and an sdltb termbase is created. This requires that you also have an export file, with the same name as the xdt file and the extension mtf.xml.  For example: You have CustomerTermbase.xdt. Then you also need a file called CustomerTermbase.mtf.xml. Just drop the xdt file, not both of them.


You can also convert just the export files (the mtf.xml), even if you have no companion xdt. Since TBX files sometimes also just have the extension xml, Glossary Converter automatically detects which type an xml file is.


The xml-only process has drawbacks:

  1. It's slower, since the converter has to search the whole export file for possible fields before starting the conversion.
  2. It's not guaranteed to cover all fields in the original termbase. Imagine you have a termbase with 20 defined fields. The xdt defines all of them, but an xml export may just contain a subset of the termbase and only make use of 12 fields. The other 8 wouldn't make it in your new data.
  3. You don't get the data type of the field automatically, you have to set it manually.

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