memoQ regex teaching on YouTube (English & Spanish)

You don't need to learn regular expressions!

The main point of many lessons in this course is that you can accomplish a lot in your translation, review, editing and quality assurance work in memoQ using regular expression ("regex") resources without ever learning syntax. When demonstrating the power of memoQ to use this pattern description language to solve problems such as filtering for text of interest in the source or target, finding and replacing text, checking for errors or undesirable text, fixing segmentation problems and more, most of these things can be accomplished without writing any expressions.

memoQ has many possibilities for saving regular expression in ways that they can be used like plug-in problem-solving tools. Most people never even realize that regex is involved.

Unfortunately, workshops, webinars and web pages intended to help you understand the role regex can play in memoQ typically de-emphasize roles and realistic use scenarios and focus instead on "how cool" the syntax can be if you are hanging out on the playground in junior high school trying to impress your friends and eating a mealworm just doesn't do it anymore. Presenters show a lot of stuff that is appealing to generations of users who slept with their slide rules, then calculators, keyboards and gaming consoles and perhaps neural implants in some awful future, but most of us are left cold and confused by a jumble of seemingly random letters, backslashes, dots and dashes, question marks going unquestioned, asterisks, all the myriad brackets and whatnot.

Nonetheless, sometimes some people can benefit from a little familiarity with syntax in context, particularly to make small changes to a solution saved in resources like a Regex Assistant library, an auto-translation rule, a QA profile, segmentation rules, an import filter and many other features of memoQ.

And for those individuals, there are some useful things out there. Some I will share here.

Anthony Rudd

The author of two books I strongly recommend created a short video in 2018 demonstrating some uses of regular expressions in memoQ.

A webinar on memoQ regex for quality control (en español)

About an hour and a half of instruction in Spanish

Miklós Urbán in his memoQ days

Miklós, now associated with RWS and BeLazy, is one of the premiere consultants for automation solutions in the translation and localization sector. In 2016 he presented a series of three webinars which are probably still the most comprehensive view of regex in memoQ available, though a lot of functionality has been added since these were recorded. For many years I considered these three videos to be primary reference sources for a deep dive into the nerdy stuff.

WARNING: Try watching no more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time or you'll get caught up in the presentation and at some point your head will explode without notice!