Are you SURE that you have your project configured correctly? I.e. the main TM enabled for lookup in the project settings?! I.e. the "Lookup" check box set?!

Yes indeed!

The only option I found so far was to disable the project TM and work directly into the Main TM, but this is suboptimal of course.

Hi Gwen Gondry,

There are 2 things you can do to achieve what you want...

You can add the tmx to your project TM by opening your project TM in the Studio Memories view, and navigating to the project's TM folder, as here:

...or wherever you have stored the project files for the job you're working on, if it's not the default place above (I keep mine in a different place to the default). Double click on the memory or highlight it and click 'Open'.

Then you select 'import' from the dropdown menu that appears under the TM in the left-hand window. Then navigate to where you have the tmx stored and you can export it.

OR

You can set the project to search both the TM and the project TM here:

So that's Project settings > Language Pairs > All language pairs > Translation Memory and Automated Translation > Search > Search both project and main translation memories.

I personally would choose the second option if the reference tmx contains a lot of TUs as two large TMs can slow a large project down...

Hope these help

All the best

Ali :)