Software components that perform conversions between user operations such as typing keys, speaking, or writing using a pen device to generate text input for applications, usually by user-guided dictionary lookup. The most common input method editors allow users to type text in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean languages, that have thousands of different characters, on a regular-sized keyboard. Typically a sequence of several characters are entered and then converted as a single entity. This conversion may have to be retried because there may be several possible translations. Similarly, for hand-writing recognition, the user may write a series of characters that are converted, and then the user selects the correct text from several possible conversion results.

a software component that converts key presses into text input which can not be typed directly

Software utility that converts keystrokes to characters in an ideographic script (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and so on).