If you are unfamiliar with this feature...

... which was introduced in its present (memoQ version 10.3) in version 9.9, or even if you already use it to some extent, I encourage you to start your work with this section watching a video by a professional colleague and quality manager at Linguaemundi in Portugal, Inês Lucas. She made this video mostly for internal company use, mostly to show her staff how to get around with the tool: find and organize expressions, use them for filtering, finding and replacing, consulting the regex syntax reference, importing and exporting libraries and other stuff.

I was caught by surprise when she made this video, and when she sent me a note asking "if it could be used", I had a quick look and immediately put my own video in progress aside, because I'm busy and I knew I wouldn't do it better. Maybe I'll do it anyway some day, but I doubt the content in English will be more relevant, so I offer you her video again:

Her success story was featured at memoQ Fest 2023

where she showed how "regex" (as managed mostly with the memoQ Regex Assistant libraries she built and distributed to the team) had helped her company to clean up its translation memories and term bases, and to work more efficiently and effectively in translation, review, QA and "repair" tasks.

A mere nine months before she gave this talk in Budapest, she couldn't use her regex skills, such as they were, for anything at all despite a few years attending good workshops and making a real effort. Now she catches my mistakes and offers good ideas for application rather frequently. Understanding that "regex" is a tool like many others, and that it can be used effectively like a no-coding toolkit to solve routine problems, was transformative.

So join the librarians' revolution!

Learn to understand where regex-based resources can be applied, and how to organize and manage these resources with transformative tools like the memoQ Regex Assistant. Don't freakin' recode the damned automation wheel!

Quit trying to puzzle out regex syntax. (If that's your thing, I do include some references, tools and evolving guidance for that in some places that can happily be ignored by everyone, but enjoy them anyway.)

Maybe that elusive syntax will come to you as you simply get stuff done with the Regex Assistant.

Or maybe it will try, but not find you, because you'll have finished work early with the Assistant on your team, and you'll be off on a beach somewhere, drinking margaritas and playing with your dog.

Import a few "books" to your stack and play.

I'll post some of the useful expressions I have in my personal library or examples that I prepared for this course. Bring ones you find interesting into your personal libraries. Try them. Share them. Change them. Translate them. Transform them for use in Trados, Phrase and other tools. And other stuff we'll talk about.

If you have some special magical regex you really want in your personal library...

... tell us about that in the comments below, and let's see what happens.

KSL