Targeting string to wrap with HTML element to italicize
First of all, I would highly recommend NOT doing this in JS for the following reasons:


You'd have JS scan through words, which may be slow.
FOUC, where the word is not italic until the JS runs.
jquery.text() captures newlines and whitespace. If the word is split with unexpected newlines in between, the script breaks.
jquery.html replaces HTML using innerHTML. This means:


Existing event handlers, especially those created by frameworks, are not cleaned up properly.
Existing event handlers will not be re-attached to your new HTML.



In addition to that, I suggest not hardcoding the replacement string. Use capture groups to have RegExp capture the match. Then convert the matched string to upper case and wrap it with the element afterwards. That way, you don't have hard-coded replacements, only the searches.

What I highly suggest is to do this on the PHP side instead. You can take the same logic, except just to it there. I believe preg_replace is what you need for this. If you cannot access the server-side code, then request access.

JS might be the quick and easy way to do this, but stuff like this over time leads to fragmented, highly unmaintainable, and hard-to-find code. A normal developer would think "Hey, it's probably italicized in the source." until they find out days later (yes, days) it was never in PHP. Thenthey'll have to hunt it down in JS, except they won't know where to start.