Technical Limitations

Several of the common errors are due to size problems, where the data hits the limits in memory or file size. This does not mean that you don't have enough computer memory, or need a bigger hard drive. It's because the software components have technical limits. 

MultiTerm uses an old version of Microsoft JET to store databases. That component can only handle files of up to 2 GB, no matter how big your disk is. Similarly, Excel can only cope with 1,048,576 rows regardless of your free system memory.

The IATE Termbase

In nine out of ten cases, this happens when users try to convert the IATE termbase. It's "the largest terminology database in the world", according to their website, with about 8 million terms across languages.

MultiTerm desktop can manage, depending on field setup and data, something in the ballpark of 500,000 terms across languages, for example 10 languages with 50,000 terms each

You can try to download IATE subsets, with just 2 languages, and maybe even apply some of their filters, thereby increasing your changes to obtain a termbase that stays within the limits.

If you already have downloaded a huge chunk of multilingual IATE date, you can use the converter to extract a bilingual subset. This assumes you have the IATE data in a tbx file.

• Set the output format to TBX.
• In the Field settings, set all languages but two to Ignore.
• Maybe also ignore some fields you're not interested in.
• Convert the data , which will create a file <termbasensme>.output.tbx.
• Convert that file to sdltb

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