Auto-translation rules control how a portion of the source text is converted to its equivalent in the target text. They are suitable for translating patterns such as dates, numbers, and references to legislation, or for converting measurements. In case of simple catalogs, auto-translation rules combined with the fragment assembly feature can also act as simple machine translation.

Auto-translation rules are based on regular expressions – an extremely powerful tool for working with text. Among other things, regular expressions make it easy for users (translators) to customize auto-translation rules. You need to specify a pattern to search for and a pattern to replace the text with.

To use this feature, you do not need to do anything (apart from creating the actual auto-translation rules). If you move the cursor to a previously untouched segment (where no translation memory hit or manual typing was inserted), memoQ first scans the translation memories, then the term bases and then the auto-translation rule sets.

When memoQ scans the source segment for auto-translatable parts, it automatically highlights those found in the source cell, allowing you to insert the desired target version manually, either by double-clicking the highlight, or selecting the auto-translation result from the Translation results pane. By default, auto-translation results appear as a green hit.

Note: memoQ comes with a number of pre-installed auto-translation rules.

See also:

▪Edit auto-translation rules