A data processing method comprising: receiving, at a computing system , a production symbol stream comprising symbols representing spoken words of a particular language from an acoustic processing system; the method being characterized by further comprising: extracting, from the production symbol stream , a plurality of production patterns comprising one or more of: an InterVowel Consonant (IVC) pattern or a Vowel Neighborhood (VN) pattern ; using stored production to canonical mapping data comprising conditional probabilities for one or more mappings of production patterns to canonical target patterns comprising one or more of: an InterVowel Consonant (IVC) pattern or a Vowel Neighborhood (VN) pattern , each mapping of the one or more mappings comprising at least a production pattern and a canonical target pattern , generating candidate syllables and a probability of each candidate syllable from the plurality of production patterns ; using a stored syllable to orthographic pattern mapping comprising conditional probabilities for one or more mappings, generating candidate orthographic patterns and a probability of each candidate orthographic pattern from the candidate syllables; based, at least in part, on the probabilities for each candidate orthographic pattern , generating an orthographic representation of the production symbol stream . receiving, at a computing system , a production symbol stream comprising symbols representing spoken words of a particular language from an acoustic processing system; the method being characterized by further comprising: extracting, from the production symbol stream , a plurality of production patterns comprising one or more of: an InterVowel Consonant (IVC) pattern or a Vowel Neighborhood (VN) pattern ; using stored production to canonical mapping data comprising conditional probabilities for one or more mappings of production patterns to canonical target patterns comprising one or more of: an InterVowel Consonant (IVC) pattern or a Vowel Neighborhood (VN) pattern , each mapping of the one or more mappings comprising at least a production pattern and a canonical target pattern , generating candidate syllables and a probability of each candidate syllable from the plurality of production patterns ; using a stored syllable to orthographic pattern mapping comprising conditional probabilities for one or more mappings, generating candidate orthographic patterns and a probability of each candidate orthographic pattern from the candidate syllables; based, at least in part, on the probabilities for each candidate orthographic pattern , generating an orthographic representation of the production symbol stream . extracting, from the production symbol stream , a plurality of production patterns comprising one or more of: an InterVowel Consonant (IVC) pattern or a Vowel Neighborhood (VN) pattern ; using stored production to canonical mapping data comprising conditional probabilities for one or more mappings of production patterns to canonical target patterns comprising one or more of: an InterVowel Consonant (IVC) pattern or a Vowel Neighborhood (VN) pattern , each mapping of the one or more mappings comprising at least a production pattern and a canonical target pattern , generating candidate syllables and a probability of each candidate syllable from the plurality of production patterns ; using a stored syllable to orthographic pattern mapping comprising conditional probabilities for one or more mappings, generating candidate orthographic patterns and a probability of each candidate orthographic pattern from the candidate syllables; based, at least in part, on the probabilities for each candidate orthographic pattern , generating an orthographic representation of the production symbol stream . <EOS>