MTX: more than just Termbases

A surprisingly wide variety of reference materials are becoming available in MIX format.

With the introduction of electronic editions of four Van Dale bilingual dictionaries (Dutch,English, Dutch,French, Dutch,German, and Dutch,Spanish), Transword Holland is the latest company to publish electronic reference materials in MTX format. The company supplies the dictionaries in a rather unconventional way: split in half. The basic package (NLOI75) contains just the entries and their target language correspondences, while supplementary wordlists (NLG 125) contain the examples (the “contexts”) from the original dictionaries, Van Dale’s bilingual handwoordenboek (concise) editions. According to Transword’s Nelline Heusinkveld, this was done to make it possible to search the context sentences for occurrences of a word, something not possible if the dictionary was more conventionally configured as one single MTX file. As the LinguaTech dealer for Holland and Belgium, Transword has localized MTX Termex and MTX Reference for the Dutch-speaking market and does brisk business here with the packages. It also distributes the many MTX dictionaries published by Eurolux, which are derived from a number of sources, including Elsevier’s and Maison du Terminologie wordstock. The Arnhem company markets the dictionaries with the Dutch version of MTX Reference as the look,up engine.
    The first terminology management package for the PC, MTXTermex has been on the market for a decade and is still going strong; the DOS package is the most widely used termbase software in the world today. MTX Reference was introduced by the Utah developers LinguaTech last fall as a complementary package to MTX Termex. Similar in functionality to its parent program, MTX Reference lacks only the dictionary-building and functions offered by MTX Termex. MTX Reference is designed for users in organiza’ tions who only need to look up terminology, not compile it. For those unfamiliar with the MTX software, it is memory resident (rSR) software which can be called with a hot, key from inside most standard software packages. The MTX interface is almost identical to that of Collins On-Line, also developed by LinguaTech, and shares the same file format. The latter lacks only the supplementary dictionary function of the MTX packages. With the availability of respected dictionaries such as those of Van Dale, Collins, and Larousse in MTX format, MTX is becoming more than just a term package and is evolving into a viable platform for a variety of reference materials. It is a welcome strategy — and long overdue. The MTX Reference software — like Collins On-Line — can be configured with a team of up to nine dictionaries. While only one is active at a time, a single function,key keystroke loads the respective dictionary corresponding to the number of the F-key and opens it with the same active entry. It’s a delightful way to navigate through multiple electronic reference works. In an ideal world, we would thus be able to assemble our choice of a monolingual dictionary, thesaurus, a bilingual dictionary, terminology lists, and other reference works, all under one software “roof” and accessible from all programs.
    The new electronic bilingual dictionaries are not Van Dale’s first incursion into the domain of electronic publishing. Three years ago, the Dutch publisher also put its three volume Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal on CD-ROM under the title Lexitron. However, it was not a great success — its retrieval software was less than ideal — and the product was withdrawn earlier this year.

Trans word Holland, Postbus 2073, 6802 CB Arnhem, The Netherlands; Tel +31 85 646477, Fax +31 85 630380