Creating a substitution list

Now that you have learned the different methods of locating and validating substitution candidates, you can begin to develop a substitution list. Use a text editor that is capable of saving in plain text. Voci recommends saving as plain text and using ".sub" as the file extension to indicate that it is a substitution file. The following sections describe the correct substitution syntax, important guidelines, and general tips to help develop an effective substitution list.

Learn more:

Syntax

Substitution files contain text, with one pattern-replacement pair on each line, separated by a colon. Blank lines and comment lines (beginning with #) are ignored.

In its basic form, a pattern and its replacement are simply words separated by spaces. For example:

TALKING TO : SPEAKING WITH

would change talking to to speaking with. The pattern, TALKING TO, is just the list of words to be matched. Character case is ignored. When these words are found in the transcribed text, they are replaced with the words SPEAKING WITH.

Word substitution is followed by other processing that determines the character case of the translated text. If you want to specify the character case for a replacement word explicitly, just enclose it with slash characters (/). For example,

laugh out loud : /LOL/

Each line in a substitution file must only contain a single substitution rule. The letter case (capitalization) of the original phrase doesn't matter because matches are not case sensitive. Capitalization of the replacement phrase will match the capitalization of the original transcript by default. Letter case can be controlled by enclosing a word between forward slashes. The example below illustrates substitution rules that correct transcription errors and capitalization.

n d a : /NDA/
pc and number : /PCN/ number 
it's vance physical therapy : /Advanced/ /Physical/ /Therapy/

Each word in the replacement text must be delimited individually. For example, the following replacement text is incorrect and will cause the substitution to fail.

it's vance physical therapy : /Advanced Physical Therapy/

Patterns allow additional options, as described in Patterns.