What is an efficient way to replace list of strings with another list in Unix file?

Question

Suppose I have two lists of strings (list A and list B) with the exact same number of entries, N, in each list, and I want to replace all occurrences of the the nth element

Answer 1

Use tr(1) (translate or delete characters):

 cat file | tr 'abc' 'XYZ' > file_new
 mv file_new file