Have you ever heard about regular expressions (also known as RegEx)? If not, they serve as a powerful resource and open a full range of possibilities in different programs such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools. One may consider the resource as a search-and-replace function on steroids. They can assist translation work by allowing a translator to search, replace and filter text in many ways that could not be possible with software tools.
You cannot even imagine how easier the process would be if a user get to:
- Do two or more separate searches simultaneously like searching for different forms of the same term or perhaps for different words altogether.
- Get to filter text in your CAT tool to display only those segments which are capitalized differently between the source and target.
- Imagine if you could search a glossary for all capitalized headwords and change them to lowercase while leaving acronyms and other terms which are in all uppercase unchanged and perform all this in a single operation.
- It’s good if you get to filter text in CAT tool and find the segments where the end punctuation varies between the source and target.
- What if you could display only the segments that contain certain words in the source, or the segments that don’t contain a specific word in the target in CAT tool?
Indeed, it would be great if you could do something beyond what the normal search and replace function can do. To make it happen, regular expressions may prove to be of great help.
Initially, regular expressions may look like cryptic but when you have learned the basics and realized their benefits, you would definitely want to invest your time to become more proficient in using them. All the following will be interested to use regular expressions for searching, replacing, and filtering text in CAT tools such as SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, or Xbench.
Apart from this, CAT tools also make use of regular expressions to create segmentation and auto-translation rules, or for protecting tags.
For Translators and interpreters
Regular expression is a special sequence of characters or symbols which define a search pattern. And the concerned patter can help translators or interpreters in searching for or replacing specific instances of words or phrases in a text. They are used by search engines, text editors and text processing utilities and for lexical analysis. However, if you are hired for Native Chinese Translation Services in Delhi, you must become aware of regular expressions as an introduction for translators.
