Pinyin to Chinese characters I'm trying to learn Chinese from books, online tutorials, but mostly from Rosetta Stone. I'm just starting, so there's still a lot I'm probably not understanding - so I don't know if I'm even asking this question right...

I would like to know how to take pinyin text with tone marks, and translate it into either English, or Chinese characters (which I could then Google-translate into English). I have found things like the Google Pinyin Input on Android, but you just type letters without tone marks, and it shows you a bunch of choices.

Since I don't know the Chinese characters at all, I don't know which to pick - and the input doesn't work if I type the tone mark myself.

For example, if I type ma, I get the characters 马 and 吗 - one means "horse", and ones means something else - one of them is mǎ and one is ma, but I have to go through about 4 steps to figure out which is which, so if I'm trying to translate even a simple sentence, it takes forever.

Is there a good tool, app, website, etc., which would help me here? I'm really open to just about any solution on the web, or mobile, or on Windows.
I suggest that you shouldn't do this.
Chinese characters cannot be faithfully constructed backwards from a tone+syllable combination -- the mapping only goes one way (and even then, sometimes characters have multiple pronunciations).
For example, as you know, 馬 is generally pronounced ma3.
However, ma3 could also reference the characters 碼 (number), or 獁 (mammoth). Without context, you do not know to which I am referring if I simply write ma3.
As you amass a vocabulary, you will start to notice patterns that will give you an intuition for which character is meant by the English pinyin, with or without tone markings.
The following two Pinyin sentences are equally comprehensible to someone with a beginning Mandarin level, as the context far dominates tone markings:

ni shi bu shi wo de pengyou
ni3 shi4 bu2 shi4 wo3 de5 peng2you5

The reader would assume:

你是不是我的朋友

Eventually, soon, you will not find it useful to use tone markings when typing Pinyin. Because it is a hassle to type, and any IME worth its salt will give you the contextually correct characters. This is probably the reason such converters don't exist.
I suggest you focus your efforts instead on learning more vocabulary and reading as much as possible. The false answers from your Pinyin IME suggestion will become obviously incorrect in your eyes.