Regular expressions?

Op 8 oktober verzorgt KTV het webinar MemoQ - Regular expressions for translators. Werk je al met memoQ en wil je je verdiepen in de mogelijkheden van REGEX? Doe dan mee met dit webinar, gegeven in het Engels door Angelika Zerfass.

Angelika legt hieronder kort uit wat Regular Expressions zijn, en hoe je ze als vertaler kunt gebruiken:

What are regular expressions (REGEX)?

Regular expressions is a way to search for text patterns, for example a combination of a number with a measurement unit. You might not know which number to search for and there might be several different units, but regular expressions can help you to find any of the following with one and the same search request: 25mm, 7 ml, 123 Hz... Or they can be used in your translation tool to convert text elements (usually placeholders) into tags, like ###NAME### or %ds or {string}... Often, regular expressions are used to define the segmentation rules. If you need to add a new rule, like defining that the dot after a number should not be treated as a sentence-end dot, regular expressions can help you there.

How can you use them as a translator?

There are different areas where regular expressions can help you to check your translations or view the documents in a more manageable format:

Converting placeholders into tags so that they can be more easily copied from the source segment to the translation and cannot be damaged.
Setting up the QA check to find instances where a non-breaking space would be needed, but only a regular or no space has been used.
Searching for a pattern, like a date (23.04.2018) and replacing it with another format (2018-04-23).
Searching for all segments that end with only two letters and a dot (which could possibly be a wrong segmentation because of an unknown abbreviation).

What are the advantages?

With regular expressions you can do things that the default settings of your translation tool cannot do.

Defining your own QA checks.
Finding patterns of numbers and symbols (25%), letters and numbers (ABC_213-x)...
When used to change text elements to tags, the tags can be easily moved from source to target, they cannot be damaged and they can also not be forgotten, as the tag check will recognize missing tags.