Creating a Translation Memory (TM)
Click the last icon of Wordfast's toolbar. In the window that opens, click the Translation memory tab, then click the TM sub-tab.
To create a new TM, click the "New TM" button. Wordfast will prompt you for a source language code, and the default "EN-US" value will be proposed.
The following list of codes gives some valid TMX language codes:
AF-01 (Afrikaans) FA-01 (Farsi) NO-NY (Norwegian)
AR-01 (Arabic) FI-01 (Finnish) PL-01 (Polish)
BE-01 (Byelorussian) FR-CA (French, Canada) PT-BR (Portuguese, Brazil)
BG-01 (Bulgarian) FR-FR (French, France) PT-PT (Portuguese, Portugal)
CA-01 (Catalan) HR-01 (Croatian) RO-01 (Romanian)
CS-01 (Czech) HU-01 (Hungarian) RU-01 (Russian)
DA-01 (Danish) IN-01 (Indonesian) SH-01 (Serbo-Croatian)
DE-AT (German, Austria) IS-01 (Icelandic) SK-01 (Slovak)
DE-CH (German, Switzerland) IT-CH (Italian, Switzerland) SL-01 (Slovenian)
DE-DE (German, Germany) IT-IT (Italian, Italy) SO-01 (Sorbian)
EL-01 (Greek) IW-01 (Hebrew) SQ-01 (Albanian)
EN-CA (English, Canada) JA-01 (Japanese) SV-SE (Swedish)
EN-GB (English, UK) KO-01 (Korean) TR-01 (Turkish)
EN-US (English, USA) LT-01 (Lithuanian) UK-01 (Ukrainian)
ES-AR (Spanish, Argentina) LV-01 (Latvian) VI-01 (Vietnamese)
ES-CL (Spanish, Chile) MK-01 (Macedonian) ZH-CN (Chinese, PRC)
ES-ES (Spanish, Spain) MT-01 (Maltese) ZH-SG (Chinese, Singapore)
ET-01 (Estonian) NL-BE (Dutch, Belgium) ZH-TW (Chinese, Taiwan)
EU-01 (Basque) NL-NL (Dutch, Netherlands)
If your language is not listed above, check out
http://www.wordfast.net/html/lang_frame.html for a more complete list of language codes. You can also consult
http://www.lisa.org/tmx/tmx.htm (click "reference") for a complete list of TMX codes available today.
After entering the source language code, enter the target language code. After entering the target language code, Wordfast will display a translation memory (which is a regular Ms-Word document in "Text" format, saved with a .txt extension) and will prompt you to save the document.
Two "Text" formats are recognized by Wordfast: "Simple text" and "Unicode". The "Unicode" format must be used to save TMs and glossaries if at least one of the two languages (source or target) does not belong to the so-called latin-1 group. The latin-1 group comprises languages of West and North Europe, Scandinavia included. The latin-1 group does not include languages of Central Europe (also called the CE group in the Windows world) even if they use, to some extent, the latin alphabet.
The format in which documents are saved is specified in the "File type" drop-down list in the "Save as" dialog box which is brought to your attention when creating a TM.
Choose the "Text only" format as in the screenshot above. Some versions of Ms-Word may call this format "Simple text". Choose the "Unicode" format if needed.
If various versions of Unicode are proposed, simply choose "Unicode". If the "Unicode" option does not exist, use the "Unicode UTF-16" option.
A translation memory is a simple text file which you can easily open with Ms-Word (recommended) or with Windows' Notepad application, or with the Mac's TextEdit application, or any text editor.
Avoid editing TMs with Excel, because sentences longer than 256 characters could be truncated. We recommended using Wordfast's own TM editor.
Once the TM is saved in a folder of your choice, the Wordfast setup window appears again. Note the new TM's name (which has now become the active TM) as it is displayed, with its creation date, language pair, and some other information.
Close the Wordfast window by clicking on the window's little "close" button (on top right in Windows, on top left in a Mac). Wordfast prompts you to save the changes you made to your setup (here, we just changed the active TM). Click "Yes".