Abstract: A speech recognition method and apparatus are provided for converting a voice stream into a digital voice stream representation. A method for performing speech recognition on a voice stream according to a first method embodiment includes the steps of determining one or more candidate transnemes in the voice stream, mapping the one or more candidate transnemes to a transneme table to convert the one or more candidate transnemes to one or more found transnemes, and mapping the one or more found transnemes to a transneme-to-vocabulary database to convert the one or more found transnemes to one or more speech units.