Assignment 4
Assignment 4
What if we did not speak the same language?
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There are wordless games, such as Qwirkle and Labyrinthe, in which players who speak different languages can still play together. These games use icons to represent the goals that players need to acheive in order to win points.
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In a multilingual extended family, such games help to break the ice and connect people around a central goal.
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Emojis have somewhat the same function - they connect people through an amical medium. It makes a text message more personal, and a well-chosen image can elicit the emotion behind an otherwise neutral text.
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There is an added hitch though - the sender and receiver need to have assigned each emoji with identical meanings. Homonyms and references for both parties need to be the same. For instance, imagine the word "train". Is it the verb for educating a person, or the noun for a locomotive pulling wagons? Or could it be the cloth that cloaks a royal figure? The fact that emojis come at the end of a message means that the text already gives the context, making it easier to tease out the meaning of the emoticon.
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This exercise in telling a story puts a new responsibility on emojis.
Instead of emphasizing a message, they convey it. And now, here's a synopsis of my most recently-watched movie!
I had a lot of fun thinking up a way to describe the most recent movie I saw, and then challenging friends to decipher my story.
Just as each person who tells a story may change a word or two, I noticed that the emojis changed from the Android phone to an iphone, and that it changed again on my desktop.
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Much in the sense of assembling multiple Chinese characters to create the meaning of one word, I found that I often used multiple images to convey one concept. Each of these concepts moves the story forward, and I used spaces to separate them.
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Enjoy the story, and check the Hint if you are truly lost in my translation!
