Regular Expressions

Regular expressions have a reputation for being difficult, but, once you start using them, you’ll find that they can really help you do things with your translation tools that would otherwise be impossible.
In this presentation we’ll be focusing on the use of regular expressions for searching, filtering and  replacing text, but CAT tools also use them for creating segmentation and autotranslation rules, protecting tags, and other operations.

Search (and Replace) on Steroids (online Power Point presentation):

 Or you can click here to download the zipped presentation

In addition to this presentation, you might find interesting the following posts:

Articles on special search techniques

How to use wildcard and format searches in MSWord to make sure all your numbers are formatted correctly

A known drawback of translating using Trados is that segments which contain only numbers cannot be opened in the translation memory tool.
This can be a problem when the document to translate contains tables of numbers: for example, you might be translating English into Italian, and you want to make sure that all numbers are formatted correctly, with a comma to separate decimals and a dot to separate thousands.
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Another useful wildcard search

One of the tasks I regularly use MS Word wildcard searches for is to make sure that index entries in Framemaker's .mif files that I'm translating as rtf (after conversion with S-tagger) are formatted correctly: according to the style guide I have to follow, index entries in Italian should normally start with a lower-case letter (unless they are the name of some program).
Click here to read the rest of the article.

Googling within a site

One thing I'm frequently asked to do is to make sure the translation I'm doing or editing is consistent with the fairly large corpus of literature in the customer's web site. [...]
Some of the consistency checking I can take care of by checking previous translation memories, or glossaries [...]
A technique that I find very useful in these cases is to google within the site.
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grepWin: a great help for complex search and replace operations

For complex search and replace operations, nothing really beats RegEx (regular expressions) searches, but regular expressions may be very difficult to create.
Click here to read the rest of the article.