Converting MARTIF to Excel

This afternoon I received an interesting project of a sort I don't see often - Star Transit. I avoided these like the plague for years, because I dislike Transit as a working environment, though I expect the latest version is probably an improvement over what I used to use. However, since Kilgray created an excellent import routine for Transit packages (PXF files), working on these projects is quite a simple matter. Except for terminology. The memoQ integration currently does not include the Transit terminology.

The client was kind enough to supply MARTIF exports from the Transit dictionaries, but unfortunately that's not an import format for memoQ, though really it should not be that difficult to deal with that XML format (I hope). So I went on the search for a solution and soon discovered a PrAdZ thread in which Czech translator Antonín Otáhal offered a VBA macro for converting the MTF files (MARTIF) to Excel.

The solution works nicely, though in my tests I found it necessary to open the MTF files in Notepad and re-save them as ANSI so the special characters in German would not get trashed. And I hate typing a full file path into the selection dialog, so I modified the code to include a proper file selection dialog. If anyone else can use such a tool, I've made it available here as an XSLM file (a macro-enabled Excel worksheet for MS Office 2010). Improvements are very welcome; I've been out of the programming game too long now to refine this much without investing more time than it is worth to me.

Nonetheless, I'm quite pleased that I can now save a tab-delimited or CSV text file from Excel and import this easily into memoQ or other translation environments. So moving term data from Star Transit to other tools is now a little easier.

To use the tool

1. Make a copy of the Excel file
2. Open your working copy of the Excel file
3. Press Alt+F8 to bring up the list of macros
4. Select the macro "mtf2excel"
   
   
   
   
5. Click the Run button. A file selection dialog will appear, and if everything is OK with the encoding, your term data should appear shortly in the columns of the Excel sheet.