After many years of searches and copy pasting, I'm still looking for simple solution that can transliterate text input on the fly from one key set to another. There are quite few online services that provide this feature but it still quite annoying to go online all the time. Unfortunately there is not that many applications left which are capable of doing so, and none of them supported by this day. I decided to make my own and at same time to learn something new for my self.

The idea is quite simple:

• application should sit in system tray and wait until input language get changed, for example to Russian.
• If Russian language is activated, application should start to listen for user key strokes combination and replace them based on custom dictionary for example R => ?, SH => ? etc.
• I should be able to bind application to any installed language (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Belarusian etc.) and customise dictionary for any of them.

So my question is:

1. Which language should I chose for this task C++, C# or might be something hardcore like Assembler, as application should work natively with Windows XP/Vista/7 or possibly Mac. (cross platform support is good but my main target is Windows)
2. Due to nature of application behaviour how can I tell anti-virus software that it is not a "Key Logger" and basically not a virus?
3. Where should I start and what should I be aware of?

P.S. My current programming knowledge is quite basic, PHP and JavaScript with Object Oriented approach.