:telephone::person::sailboat::whale::okhand:; or "Call me Ishmael" - How do you translate emoji?
This is an incremental study on translation methods for emoji, relevant to computational linguistics and digital communication.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding how emoji are used in translation by analyzing Emoji Dick, a crowdsourced translation of Moby Dick into emoji, and found that semantics are preserved but repetition is more common in emoji.
We report on an exploratory analysis of Emoji Dick, a project that leverages crowdsourcing to translate Melville's Moby Dick into emoji. This distinctive use of emoji removes textual context, and leads to a varying translation quality. In this paper, we use statistical word alignment and part-of-speech tagging to explore how people use emoji. Despite these simple methods, we observed differences in token and part-of-speech distributions. Experiments also suggest that semantics are preserved in the translation, and repetition is more common in emoji.