Wildcards are my friends...

[alexpgp]

Every once in a while, your friendly, neighborhood translator is gobsmacked by an abbreviation that shows up in a document seemingly out of nowhere and, naturally, demands attention.

Take, for example, the Russian abbreviation "САР" (—please!) in a document I'm working on. To my credit, I realize there's a better than even chance that the last two letters stand for анализ риска (risk analysis), but without knowing what the first letter expands to, I may as well just transliterate the abbreviation (SAR) and move on, as it were.

That is, except for one sturdy little straw that's available for the grasping, involving a search using wildcards. Consider the following string:

[а-я]@

In Microsoft Word's variant of wildcard code, this means "one or more occurrences of any lower-case letter between 'а' and 'я'." If one tacks the character 'с' to the front, like this:

с[а-я]@

followed by a space, performing a search will find every instance of a word of at least two letters whose first letter is 'с'. Continuing with this logic,

с[а-я]@ а[а-я]@ р[а-я]@

will find three consecutive words, of two or more letters each, that begin with 'с', 'а', and 'р', respectively (I use lower case because Russian is generally pretty sparing when it comes to capitalizing words).

I hit paydirt with the second successful "find":

системный анализ риска

or "system risk analysis."

There are times this technique will not work, but it's almost always worth a try when you're up against it.

Cheers...