Today we're back on track with a topic that requires more exposure. Of course, we're talking about regular expressions (regex, for short).
We'll have a quick overview of how we can leverage that for use in the localization industry.
'Regex Experts' Anyone?
I keep seeing more and more advertising and job offers that aim at a professional with this specific skill set: localization and regex knowledge.
The link between these two is still unknown to me - it's surely something in the early stages of development in terms of new opportunities! That said, I cannot fail to see how, now more than ever, knowing even a bit of regex can help us in our day-to-day lives as translators.
See, translators moved from being 'manual' writers to computer geeks who work around the world and the clock, traveling and relentlessly gapping cultural and linguistic bridges thanks to their good approach to both languages and technologies.
What a Regular Expression Is
So let's just introduce what a regular expression is:
"a sequence of symbols and characters expressing a string or pattern to be searched for within a longer piece of text"
In my terms: a sequence with a bunch of weird characters, each playing a role in finding text and then handling them in the handier way for us, should that be filtering, extracting, replacing, creating QA modules, and so on.
These are all things that regular expressions can do, and some CAT tools come equipped with more stuff than others to do the job.
My personal preference falls on memoQ. This tool, developed by the Hungarian Kilgray, has all said features. You just need to know how to look, and how to write regex, of course!
Other tools can perform regex work in one way or another, but for now, let's focus on memoQ.
Learn How to Regex
We can learn regex the hard way, so that means with trial and error via, for example, one of those debuggers available online, and analyzing what we're doing until we come up with the result we want.
For our purpose, I'd suggest debugging via this website: https://regex101.com/.
Thank you for your attention!