Lost in emoji translation: the vicissitudes of online interaction.
This happened to me today. I went for a coffee with a friend and colleague who is working on a research about Instagram and its impact on the everyday contemporary experience. Not only she is interested in Instagram as a locus of reflection, but she is an Instagram enthusiast sharing with her followers a carefully curated feed of food, places, and landscapes.
Our order arrived and she promptly arranged a flat lay composition of our plates, cups, silverware, and sunglasses for a shot, which didn’t take long for her to post. We have an inside joke. I always post a series of three emoji hearts, flowers or smiling faces in every single picture we take together, not only just a silly reminder of that particular moment but a way to engage her audience in our very own silliness. My choice for that picture was a string of lattes to match our order.
Emojis, to me, are symbols that aim to convey more subtle and subjective information through texting. Writing in digital platforms by itself can be misleading. How many times we gasped at the sight of an important text message, thinking that our interlocutor was mad at us just because they typed a laconic “ok” as a response, let’s say, to a dinner invitation? I would say way too many. Emojis are a form of emotional punctuation. They help us set a specific tone to a conversation without the need for facial and bodily expressions.
As I typed, she made an unusual and enthusiastic remark: “Your emojis are different from mine! Don’t you have espressos?”
That was the start of a very particular conversation on the issues of translation. “No, just lattes and look: your espresso emoji appears to me as if they were lattes as well.” “I guess many misunderstandings may have happened due to this kind of conflict among different platforms and operational systems”. And I added: “This is a problem of mediation.”
Translation is a key element for Anthropological thinking. Since the beginning of the discipline, language, meaning and context were intertwined with the production of ethnographic theory. The traditional training for an ethnographer was to become embedded in Another’s world, that being the radical Other: traditional societies, speaking languages and operating concepts stranger to Western thought. As many bilinguals know — me included — language is not a matter of grammar as it is a matter of context. One can spend years trying to grasp the formal language, but all of this is futile faced with the imperative of daily interactions. Language — as culture — is a living being constantly reinvented in each and every experience.
Meaning is rendered visible to us due to our ability for mediation, that is, the capacity to access different — and most times conflicted — perspectives by comparing our own system of thinking to another’s and coming to a synthesis, a middle ground of understanding.
We have come a long way since those first ethnographic monographs. However, the issue of translation is more vivid than ever and don’t necessarily involve different alphabets or structures of language. It can materialise in a simple and almost insignificant emoji.
Emojis, pictures we post on Instagram or Facebook, even interfaces we interact with on the daily basis that seem really simple and intuitive but in reality are the result of a complex project of programming, design and user experience research. Images have become our current language and many of us don’t spend a second reflecting upon their impact in our understanding of the world.
This is because we often think about images as an actual representation of the world around us, not as social constructions. Let’s take emojis as an example since they are our current topic of discussion. Emojis were invented in 1998 to be used in Japanese mobile phones by Shigetaka Kurita and the word emoji literally translates as “picture letter”.
Emojis have been standardised across all devices and they’ve even been incorporated into Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley-based group of computer and software corporations and individual volunteers with backgrounds in technology, encoding and linguistics.
There are only a certain number of official emoji emoticons and they’re divided into the following categories: people, nature, objects, places and symbols. The total number of emojis worldwide is currently 2,600, but the consortium approves about 50–100 new emojis every year.
Users can suggest the creation of new emojis and in order to do that, have to appeal to cultural specificity and general interest. In an interview for Fortune Magazine, Mark Davis, president and co-founder of the group, stated that: “people need to make a case as to why they think their emoji is going to be frequently used, how it breaks new ground, how it is different from other emojis that have already been encoded.” “Anything that needs a lot of detail to explain or understand is trouble.”
Certainly, we don’t think about the context in which Emojis come to life, neither their cultural specificity and purpose to simulate a universal set of emotional responses while choosing between ‘lattes’ or ‘espressos’, ‘tears of laughter’ or simply ‘smiling face’. Anthropology is not a thing locked inside ivory towers, but a way for us to really grasp the complexity of our immediate realities through the little things we relate to everyday ;)
