Hello Audrey Demers ,

Reference files in Studio are only meant for 'reference' purposes and cannot be searched in Studio as you would a normal translatable file.

Also to open the reference file, you would need the specific program to be able to open it in its native form.

If you have the original and translated file, you could create a TM and use this in the project.

Would this be a workable solution for you?

This question was also asked here https://community.sdl.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/f/studio/9930/memoq-livedocs-in-sdl-studio. It is not possible to search monolingual files directly from Studio.

That said:

Maybe you could use LF aligner (https://sourceforge.net/projects/aligner/) to 'align' monolingual documents into a TMX using a dummy source language and your target language, import this TMX into a Studio TM and use this alongside your main TM set to cocordance only and perform concordance searches in the target language from Studio by pressing F3 with the target language word selected.

Don't forget if you already have memoQ you can also export existing LiveDocs corpora to a memoQ TM and export to TMX (https://help.memoq.com/current/en/Places/export-livedocs-to-tm.html)

If you have a lot of monolingual reference material maybe building your own searchable corpus is an option using something like Sketch Engine?www.sketchengine.eu/.../

Or use XBench (https://www.xbench.net/) to search glossaries in a huge number of different formats with a keyboard shortcut from Studio? It's an excellent concordance search tool and the CTRL + SHIFT + INS shortcut makes switching between applications easy.

And another thing to bear in mind some reference files are not much more than a distraction or out of date, it may be quicker to get the job done without them. 

Best of luck,

Daniel