Translating a Voice I Grew Up With (Summer 2021)
I took a translation course via Catapult recently. For the final assignment for the course, each of us translated a piece of text into English (our classmates all speak English but don’t share the same language other than English) for each other to discuss and critique.
When I learned about this assignment, I instantly thought of an open-ed piece from over ten years ago, which my family and I read together in the Southern Weekly newspaper.
I learned from the translation course that in order to publish translation work (this blog counts as publishing too), I need to acquire permission from the publisher. I emailed and called to express my hope to publish my translation. The newspaper staff told me to do an excerpt of it instead of the whole piece.
Arguments in the Recent History of Emoji -- In Honor of World Emoji Day 2018
The first emoji was created in 1999 on Japanese mobile phones. As of the time I (just) Googled, there were 2,666 existing emojis. For the sake of the flow of this article, please expect no funny pics of emoji in between sentences 😂.
Emoji: A step forward or back for our language?
During an event at which Apple announced new, upgraded emoji features (added icons, color effects, etc.), one of the company’s developers claimed that using emoji is in conflict with the development of understanding the English language: “The children tomorrow will have no understanding of the English language.”
Supporting this idea was a female blogger’s 24-hour experiment, in which she texted her friends and family using only emojis. After the experiment, she came to realize several challenges of [using] pure pictorial communication {with emojis}. First, emojis are not fixed in meaning and are highly open to interpretation across cultures or background knowledge. For instance, the use of an emoji of two hands palm-to-palm is not consistent across cultures. According to researcher Neil Cohn, “🙏” tend to be used by Asians to express appreciation (“thank you,” “please”), while Western cultures generally use it as a substitute for “praying.” In this case, if one emoji could stimulate various responses or sensations, it is beyond prediction how a complete sentence built by only emojis would trigger massive misinterpretation.