TMW Converter

Extract text from legacy Trados memories (TMW)


Drop or upload your .TMW file
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How to extract text from your TMW file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your TMW file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert TMW to another file type

To convert TMW translation memories to another format, you need Trados Studio or other Database software.

Convert a file to TMW

To convert other file formats to the "Translation Memory File" file type, you need software like Trados Studio or a similar tool.


About TMW files

A .TMW file is a proprietary Translation Memory database used by Trados Studio to store aligned bilingual text segments. It is created and primarily opened using Trados Studio or legacy SDL Trados software. Users often need to convert .TMW files because it is a closed, proprietary format requiring an expensive commercial license to open natively. This creates a rigid vendor lock-in, making it difficult or impossible to share linguistic data with localization teams using competing CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation) tools. The best target format for a .TMW file is TMX (Translation Memory eXchange), an open XML standard that preserves language tags, segmentation rules, and metadata without data loss. For basic human review, exporting to CSV or XLSX is also common. This file format is difficult to open or convert because it is a compiled proprietary database. Often, only the original Trados software can properly read or export the data. However, you can just drag and drop your file into convert.guru to identify the format, view its metadata, and convert it when possible. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format, viewing or extracting the text may still be possible.

Convert.Guru analyzes your TMW file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.


FAQ

If you want to convert TMW file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Trados Studio or similar software from the "Translation Memory Database" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to TMW, try Trados Studio or another comparable tool in the "Translation Memory Database" category.



The TMW Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our TMW converter.