Turn off emoticons in iOS I'd like to be able to stop iOS automatically converting emoticons as pictures. I want it so that, for example, instead of a picture of a smiling face my phone displays the raw characters of a colon followed by a right bracket [ :) ].

Anyone have any more thoughts on this?
It's a feature of iOS 10. You'll have to delete the emoji keyboard to get rid of that, by going to Settings > General > Keyboards. 

Since iOS 10 introduced the predictive text feature, you can type in English and have words corrected in other languages, provided that the keyboard is enabled.