Thanks Monika - can you explain your use case a bit more, just for my understanding? Thanks, Daniel

My client has a few international units which should not be translated. So I tried to tag these units using Regex in Trados to lock them for processing. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for units with superscript numbers, as these are automatically tagged in Trados. Regex works fine outside of Trados, but because of the "superscript tag", it doesn't work within Trados. Support wasn't able to find a workaround here either.

The unit I tried to regex is "(min^-1 / rpm)" and here is the regex I tried to use.

Thanks Monika - tagging Paul  to see if he would have any ideas. I was wondering if the "-1" can be tagged on its own but that might alter unwanted other text potentially, but then you should get opening tag + placeholder + closing tag. But it might be too aggressive. Thanks, Daniel 

Monika Dorn 

Have you tried replacing them with the hidden text attribute in Word?  That would cause the entire unit to become a tag, and hence not translatable?

Hello Paul, that would be quite a lot of work as the customer has about 200.000 modules in their system. I was already suggesting to the customer to implement a non translatable format but that would be a ton of work for all the modules this is why I hoped I could regex the units.

Hello Paul, that would be quite a lot of work as the customer has about 200.000 modules in their system. I was already suggesting to the customer to implement a non translatable format but that would be a ton of work for all the modules this is why I hoped I could regex the units.

 Monika Dorn 

I guess you could do this with a powershell script and regex, or even a Word macro, so that the units were all non-translatable before going into Trados Studio.  Creating the script would just be a little more work (one-off) than creating all the regex you'd need to support that anyway.

Hi Monika, 
As far as I understand from your regex example, you suppose to process each type of unit individually. I mean not every single instance of min^-1 / rpm, but all instances of min^-1 / rpm, all instances of kg/m³, all instances of rpm, etc. Am I right? If yes, you can batch replace all type of a unit with the same hidden unit.
To this effect, select a unit, press Ctrl+C, press Ctrl+H. 
In 'Find what', press Ctrl+V to paste your unit.
In 'Replace with', click Format > Font > Hidden and leave the field with no value at all (blank).
Make sure the 'Replace with' field has a 'hidden' attribute.
Click Replace all. This would make all the instances of that unit non-translatable.
Proceed with other units using the same steps.

Ah, one more thing... Unless you have a specific reason, I would not include parentheses in Find what. This would only convert the content between them, and you would clearly see in Trados a placeholder in parentheses. I think it would add more "context" for you to quickly understand what that placeholder stands for (for a unit).

Hello Stepan, thank you for your reply.
I am aware that I can hide the units in a word document before I import the file. But there are quite a lot of units, which would be a tremendous amount of work beforehand everytime. The customer is not really consistent in the way they write the units so I have to search for every possible way. Sometimes it is written with brackets, sometimes without, sometimes with white spaces, sometimes without. Sometimes with square brackets, sometimes with round brackets.
This is why I was hoping there was a way to regex them all in Trados so that I do not have to hide everything everytime in every document.