A method for translating stenographic strokes includes the steps of receiving a series of stenographic strokes, creating a table of translations of one or more strokes within the series of strokes, sequentially assigning a score to each of the one or more strokes, determining at least one alternate translation to at least one of the translations in the table of translations, ranking the translations and alternate translations based on an accumulation of the score of the strokes within, and selecting one of the ranked translations or one of the ranked alternate translations based on a best score.