An Emoji story

Using emoji to describe what I last watched was quite interesting in that it is a kind of translation. I’ve always thought, as I translated one language to another, the point to be the bringing across of the content in the way which most faithfully represents the original. In trying to use Emoji to do this, I found that I could sometimes use words and sometimes ideas. I did not use syllables, but suspect that, had I been working with another artistic work, I would have needed to do so. When comparing this to other translations I have made, what most struck me was what I may call the loss of nuance. When translating one language to another, I have always found that, so long as I could pick up the nuances of the original myself, I could express them in the destination language to some extent. The translations would sometimes come out long but, so long as a literal translation was not required, this would not be a problem. As with all translations, the limits of the ability of the translator to both see and express nuances would be the limits of the translation.

When working with Emoji, I found that I could state the surface level details easily enough, but also found that when I tried to connect them with the deeper and more interesting parts of the original, it became difficult to do so properly. Part of this is, I think, because there are far more words in any vocabulary than there are Emoji in any collection. Again, the connections between words and sentences are easier to make than the connections between Emoji, particularly for those of us who have been brought up writing text with alphabets. This was partly compensated for by the visual nature of the work I was attempting to summarize, I think I would have had a harder time if I had chosen to summarize the last book I read just because it is a text medium. Having said that, I chose the work I was summarizing because it was the last thing I saw and because it was something of a challenge to summarize though the title was quite easy to start with.