The present invention provides a method, system and computer program product for improved display of host terminal applications on data processing systems having a small display size. In one embodiment, a host application translator reads characters stored in a character buffer and character attributes stored in an attribute buffer of a computer host terminal application that is displayed to a user as lines of characters. The host application translator performs component recognition on the characters and the character attributes to identify essential characters. Essential characters are characters that are required to be displayed to a user for the user to be able to interact with the computer host terminal application. The host application translator generates hypertext markup language code (HTML) for reconfiguring the characters for display on a portable data processing system having a small display size.