16. The program product of claim 15 , wherein: the phonetic string comprises Chinese romanization; and the candidates comprise Chinese characters.
15. A computer program product, encoded on a tangible program carrier, operable to cause a portable device to perform operations comprising: presenting a virtual keyboard corresponding to a first alphabet in a first region of a touch-sensitive display of a device; receiving an input on the virtual keyboard representing a phonetic string; presenting the phonetic string in a second region of the touch-sensitive display; identifying one or more candidate representations based on the phonetic strings wherein the candidate representations correspond to a second alphabet different from the first alphabet; presenting a candidate tray including at least a subset of the candidate representations in the first region; receiving an input of a selected candidate representation of the candidate representations; and replacing the entered phonetic string with the selected candidate representation.