Lost in translation: The Emoji gap
Emojis hailed from Japan in the 90’s and could potentially do what Esperanto failed to: become a global communication „language“. While most emojis do share a common meaning across the globe, placed in the wrong context, they can create some unnerving lost in translation moments.
As the audiences attention span becomes shorter and shorter, global players need to use more imagery to convey their messages. And where words fail, they can say it with pictures. Which represents the basic idea behind the emojis, an essential tool in modern communication. Emojis add a nuanced and emotional value to flat digital text. As a universal language tool, an emoji can set a sentence tone by helping us convey facial expressions which couldn’t be transported through text.
The peak and the flipside
In 2015 emojis officially hit mainstream culture and even managed to end up becoming the word of the year in the prestigious Oxford Dictionaries entries. In the same year some big ad campaigns rolled out like the Chevy Press release written entirely with emojis or receiving an international day of honor — just to name a few.
But with the emergence of the mass phenomenon, some emojis became problematic or even taboo. Apple rolled out their LGBT emojis to celebrate diversity and promote tolerance, yet in Russia, the tech giant came under scrutiny and is now subject to a nationwide investigation for promoting „homosexual propaganda“.
Another example of emojis being culturally problematic would be well known „like hand“, first introduced by Facebook. The gesture, even though now socially accepted across the globe as a symbol of approval, first had difficulties in the Middle East, Russia, West Africa and South America. There, the seemingly universal gesture was first perceived as profoundly obscene, the equivalent of the middle finger in the western world.
The platform based emoji gap
Imagine this disastrous scenario: You are trying to send a 😂 to your BFF and on the other end of the line, your pal is receiving an 😡. Total chaos!
The Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit based in California, Mountain View, prevents any form of cross-platform emoji apocalypse from happening, by creating standardized design guidelines. Yet even if the core guide of an emoji is universal and a smiley face would be a smiley face regardless of the device used, there is a great deal of interpretation possible when it comes to design.
Check out some of the Emoji Gap Fails:
- The Cookie Monster Scandal
2. Ground control to Major Tom…
3. Space invader fail
4. Ghosting
For more localization info check us out at Beluga Linguistics.
