I, for one, am a frequent user of Search and Replace. An interesting feature that Word possesses and Trados does not, is the possibility of intelligent capitalization in Search and Replace. Let me explain and give you an example if you get the idea.

Right now I am translating a technical manual of a ship from English into Spanish. The word “ship” can be translated in many different ways: barco, buque, nave, embarcación, etc. Some of those words are feminine (they go with a feminine article) and some are masculine, i.e. “el barco, la nave, la embarcación, etc."

When reviewing a file translated by several translators, or at the end of a long project, it's a good idea to check consistency. In some circumstances, it does not look good if “ship” has been translated inconsistently (if you are picky, chose a more technical word such as “bolt” or “pin”. consistency there IS important). So what I do is decide a unique translation for “ship” and then implement it throughout the text.

And how is where the feature I am asking comes in. In Spanish, you would have to change “el barco” to “la embarcación”. It would be great to have a checkbox so that, if instead of “el barco”, trados finds “El barco”, the system would know that the correct replacement is “La embarcación” and if Trados finds “el barco” then the correct replacement would be “la embarcación” (that checkbox might be called intelligent capitalization or something).

The implementation could be something like this. If "Match case” is unchecked and Intelligent capitalization is checked, if Trados finds a string for which the first letter is capitalized, then the first letter of the replaced string will be capitalized as well. Intelligent capitalization would only affect the first letter.

YOu can't imagine how many times this arises in my projects. When susbtituting a big setof words (for example, when I am given a glossary to follow and that means using “herramienta” for “utensilio”, "taladro” for “perforadora", etc.. I always have to pay attention to whether the word I try to replace is capitalized (i.e. usually at the beginning of a sentence) or not. In practice, that means either going one by one or performing two search and replace operations (one with “Perforadora” and another for “perforadora”  for every single word I want to change, that means doubling the work) I must say that I usually work with glossaries that must be followed to the letter, and that usually involves changing tens or scores of words at the end of a project. As I said, I use search and replace EXTENSIVELY.

I would not even mention this here if were it not by the fact that Microsoft Word does it by default. If you want to replace “máquina” for “maquinaria” (in lower case). it will automatically replace "Máquina” for “Maquinaria” (note capitalization) as well unless you disable Match case. That is, it does it automatically without doing anything (you may check it yourself, I use Word 2010). That means someone at Microsoft considered this a handy feature...

You may even change this to be the default behaviour in Trados Search and Replace and forget about a new checkbox, if you feel this would complicate things!