Welcome to TBX Resources

TBX Resources is dedicated to helping you use the industry-standard TBX format with your terminological data. Here you'll find tutorials and tools for using and converting to and from TBX. For more information regarding this file format and its history, please have a look at the new TBX site.

Before You Do Anything...

The utilities on our site require input to be in UTF-8. If your files are in UTF-16, you can convert them here.

Information and Tutorials

Terminology management

For an introduction to terminology management and the application of TBX, see Terminology in the age of multilingual corpora.

TBX-Min

TBX-Min is a newly developed dialect of TBX designed for simple and straightforward storage of bilingual or monolingual glossaries. It was also designed to be easily converted to and from its larger cousin TBX Basic, as well as other well known glossary storage formats such as UTX. One of its most useful applications would be as a limited resource for a translator working on an assignment which does not necessitate the use of all of the available information potentially included in a TBX Basic multilingual master glossary. They could simply pull a TBX-Min bilingual glossary from the master to use on the assignment, and send the file back with any changes (at which time it could be merged back into the master TBX Basic file). Click here for resources and tools.

TBX-Basic

TBX-Basic is a dialect in the TBX family, intended to provide the data categories most commonly used in translation and localization work.

For an XML-free introduction to the TBX-Basic dialect, see TBX-Basic: Translation-oriented Terminology Made Simple. This article uses a simple format, called MRC TermTable (Multiple Rows per Concept), to illustrate its examples. An MRC TermTable can be automatically converted to TBX-Basic using software linked below.

The TBX-Basic package contains the advanced tutorial listed below, a list of the TBX-Basic data categories, the TBX Checker tool and required files, and an RNG schema for checking TBX-Basic files with software such as <Oxygen/>. It also contains several demo files showing common TBX(-Basic) errors. It is an excellent resource for learning how to work with TBX amd TBX-Basic.

TBX Tutorials

Here a is tutorial for getting started with TBX. It assumes a basic knowledge of terminology management and MultiTerm, and covers converting data from MultiTerm or MRC into TBX.

This is an advanced tutorial, written by Vicki Leary, on validating TBX files against TBX rules. Knowledge of tools and processes will enable you to check your own TBX files in your work environment. The reader should understand the basics of XML, TBX and terminology management. Also see the TBX-Basic package listed in the previous section.

Software Claiming TBX Support of Some Kind

We are in the process of gathering a list of software products which claim TBX support. We hope you will find utility in this compilation, and perhaps even contribute more information.

View the list here.

Tools for Working with TBX

TBX Checking

Not sure if your file really conforms to TBX standards? You can check your TBX files using a free, open source utility. More information here.

Want to make your own TML validator? Try the brand new RNG generator.

Converting to and from TBX Format

Below are links to various tools we provide online for converting your data to (and sometimes from) TBX.

MultiTerm to TBX Conversion

MultiTerm data can be rather more complicated to work with. Luckily, we provide you with the resources to convert your MultiTerm termbase into TBX, using data categories of your choice, here.

MRC to TBX-Basic Conversion

MRC is intended as a human readable alternative to TBX-Basic. Instead of being written in XML, it is formatted in rows and tab-separated columns. MRC has the advantage of being editable in Excel or any other spreadsheet program. MRC can easily be converted to TBX-Basic using the utility on this site. Below is a list of resources to get you started with using MRC and converting it to TBX-Basic:

TBX-Glossary, GlossML, UTX, OLIF and Tabular Data Conversion

We provide an online tool to convert your glossaries between TBX-Glossary, GlossML, UTX, OLIF, or simply-formatted tabular data.