Find & Replace

Supervertaler’s Find & Replace feature helps you quickly find text and make consistent changes across your translation.

Opening Find & Replace

• Press Ctrl+F or Ctrl+H
• Or go to Edit → Find… or Edit → Replace… (both open the same dialog)

Dialog layout

The action buttons are grouped to make destructive actions visually distinct from non-destructive ones. Reading left to right:

• Find next | Find all | Highlight all | Clear highlights – non-destructive: searching and highlighting only, no edits made.
• A vertical separator marks the boundary.
• Replace this | Replace all – destructive: these modify your translation. They appear with an amber background as a visual cue that clicking them changes the document.

The Close button sits at the far right.

Keyboard shortcuts inside the dialog

Key	Where	Action
Enter	in the Find field	Triggers Find next
Enter	in the Replace field	Triggers Replace all (the existing confirmation prompt still appears first)
Escape	anywhere	Closes the dialog

The Enter-in-Replace shortcut is intentional: the Replace all confirmation dialog catches accidental presses, so pressing Enter never silently overwrites your translation.

Basic Usage

Finding Text

1. Type your search term in the Find field
2. Click Find all to see all matches, or press Enter for Find next
3. Matches are highlighted in yellow in the grid
4. The results counter shows how many matches were found

Replacing Text

1. Type your search term in the Find field
2. Type your replacement in the Replace field
3. Click the amber Replace all button, or press Enter while the Replace field has focus
4. Confirm the replacement count when the dialog asks
5. A confirmation shows how many replacements were made

Search Options

Match

Three mutually exclusive modes (radio buttons):

Mode	Description
Anything	Matches the search term anywhere in the text (the default)
Whole words	Matches the search term only as a complete word
Entire segment	Matches only when the whole segment equals the search term

Case sensitive

• ✅ On: “Hello” won’t match “hello”
• ❌ Off (default): “Hello” matches “hello”, “HELLO”, etc.

Auto-adjust case

When replacing, adjusts the replacement to match the case pattern of each match – ALL CAPS → uppercased, all lower → lowercased, Title Case → title-cased. It has no effect when Case sensitive is on, and is ignored in Regex mode.

Search in

Scope	Description
Source	Search the source column
Target (default)	Search the translations
Both	Tick both boxes to search source and target

Reset edited to Draft

When a replacement changes a target segment that was Confirmed, Proofread or Approved, that segment is reset to Draft, so the segments Find & Replace touched are easy to spot and re-check afterwards.

• ✅ On (default): edited finished segments drop back to Draft.
• ❌ Off: segments keep their existing status.

This applies to Replace this, Replace all and F&R Sets batch runs. Only segments whose text actually changes are affected, and replacing in the source column never changes a status. The setting is remembered between sessions, and Ctrl+Z restores the original text and status together.

Also in writable TMs

Tick Also in writable TMs and Replace all makes the same change in your translation memories as well as in the project (from v1.10.372). This is handy after you have changed a term throughout a project: the old wording then stops coming back as TM matches.

• Only the TMs this project writes to are changed – the ones with Write ticked in the project’s TM list. Read-only TMs are never touched.
• Only Replace all does this. Replace this changes the project only.
• The TMs are changed using the same options as the project: Match, Case sensitive, Auto-adjust case and Regex. TM translations are changed when Target is ticked; TM source text only when Source is ticked and Allow Replace in Source Text is on in Settings → ⚙️ General.
• Nothing happens blindly. The confirmation says how many TM entries will change and in which TMs, and shows a few examples. If there are no matches left in the project itself, Replace all still offers to change the TMs.
• If a change makes a TM entry identical to one that is already in the same TM, the two are merged, and the summary says so.

Caution

TM changes cannot be undone with Ctrl+Z. That’s why the option is unticked every time you open the dialog. Before a big change, you may want to back up your TMs with File → Export → 📦 Back Up All TMs & Termbases….

Regular expressions

Tick Regex to treat the Find field as a regular expression (Python re syntax).

• Backreferences in Replace: capture groups in the pattern can be reused in the Replace field as \1, \2, … (or \g<name> for named groups). For example, Find "([^"]+)" and Replace «\1» turns "events" into «events».
• Case sensitive still applies (off = the whole pattern matches case-insensitively).
• While Regex is on, the Match modes and Auto-adjust case don’t apply and are greyed out.
• Invalid patterns are caught: an unbalanced pattern (e.g. () or a bad backreference (e.g. \9 with no matching group) shows a clear error and changes nothing – it never crashes or partially replaces.

Tip

A few handy patterns: \s+ (runs of whitespace), {2,} (two or more spaces), \b(\w+)\s+\1\b (doubled words like “the the”), +$ (trailing spaces).

History Dropdowns

Both the Find and Replace fields remember your recent searches:

• Click the dropdown arrow to see your last 20 entries
• Start typing to filter the history
• History persists between sessions

F&R Sets (Batch Operations)

Save and reuse multiple find/replace operations as a set.

Creating a Set

1. Expand the F&R Sets panel at the bottom of the dialog
2. Click + New Set
3. Give your set a name (e.g., “Client Style Guide”)
4. The set appears in the list of sets

Adding Operations to a Set

1. Enter your Find and Replace terms
2. Set your options (Match mode, Case sensitive, Regex, Search in) – these are all saved with the operation
3. Click + Add Current to Set
4. The operation is saved to the active set

Managing Operations

In the F&R Sets panel:

• ✓ (Enabled) column – tick to include an operation when you click Run All; untick to skip it. (Hover for a reminder.)
• QA column – tick to turn the operation into a find-only QA check. It then never replaces anything, and QA → 🔎 Run QA Checks… lists its matches instead. See QA Checks.
• Edit – double-click an operation to load it back into the Find/Replace fields.
• 🗑 Delete Operation – removes the selected operation from the set.
• 🗑 Delete Set – removes the selected set entirely.

The Match column shows each operation’s mode, or Regex when the operation is a regular expression.

Running a Batch

1. Select your set
2. Click ▶ Run All
3. Each enabled operation runs in turn; regex operations (shown as “Regex” in the Match column) run with backreferences
4. See how many replacements were made

Operations with QA ticked are always skipped by Run All, even when they are enabled.

Caution

An empty “Replace with” deletes matches. An operation with a blank Replace field replaces every match with nothing – i.e. it deletes the matched text. If a set contains any such operation, Run All lists them and defaults the confirmation button to No, so you don’t wipe text by accident. If you only want to find something, tick QA for that operation instead.

Importing & exporting sets

Share sets with colleagues:

• 📤 Export – save the selected set as a .svfr file
• 📥 Import – load a shared .svfr file

Use Cases

Terminology Consistency

Create a set for client-specific terms:

• “colour” → “color” (US spelling)
• “organisation” → “organization”
• “programme” → “program”

Style Guide Rules

Enforce style guidelines:

• Double spaces → Single space
• “e.g.” → “for example”
• Straight quotes → Curly quotes

Post-Translation Cleanup

Clean up common MT artifacts:

• Remove unwanted spaces before punctuation
• Fix capitalization issues
• Normalize formatting

Tips

Tip

Pro Tip: Use regex mode for complex patterns. For example, \s+ matches any whitespace to clean up extra spaces.

Note

Undo Support: All replacements in the project can be undone with Ctrl+Z (within the same session). Changes made in your TMs with Also in writable TMs are the exception.