Motivated by grammatical inference and data compression applications, we propose an algorithm to update a suffix array after the substitution, in the indexed text, of some occurrences of a given word by a new character. Compared to other published index update methods, the problem addressed here may require the modification of a large number of distinct positions over the original text. The proposed algorithm uses the specific internal order of suffix arrays in order to update simultaneously groups of entries, and ensures that only entries to be modified are visited. Experiments confirm a significant execution time speed-up compared to the construction of suffix array from scratch at each step of the application.