Localisation of Emoji
Origin
The “Emoji” first emerged in Japan, evolving from emoticons like :–) and :D of the early internet age of the 90s, to expressing emotional nuances of the present. An artist employed at a Japanese phone network curated the world’s first set of 176 emoji in 1999. The collection has been enshrined at the New York Museum of Modern Art as a testament to its cultural value.
The word emoji itself originates from Japanese — where it is a portmanteau of the phrase e “picture” and moji “character” (resemblance to the word “emotion” is purely coincidental). It wasn’t long before competing networks in Japan made emoji available to their customers, and like wildfire, the craze took over the world.
How the use of Emoji differs across geography
Because of their visual and symbolic aspects, emoji are mostly perceived as a form of communication that surpasses boundaries, linguistic and cultural. Linguists are ever curious to understand the use of emoji to express tone and emotional nuance. Most of the frequently used emoji are hand or facial gestures/expressions suggesting some emotion.
It shouldn’t be assumed that symbols are interpreted in the same way across cultures, however.
Taking a classic case from the physical world is hand gestures: a thumbs-up 👍. Being traditionally a positive message of approval in most Western countries, in Greece and the Middle East it can be deemed as rude or offensive.
Similarly, the subtly smiling emoji 🙂 is not read as a sign of happiness in China, but rather a symbol of disbelief or distrust 🤔.
Likewise, the ‘horn’ 🤘 hand gesture is “I love you” in American Sign Language. Despite this, most people use it as “rock on”. But be careful while using this emoji with a person from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Colombia as this is interpreted as their partner cheating on them. Not so ‘rocking’ or ‘affectionate’ anymore, is it?
Thus, it can prove useful to think of emoji, not as a language of their own, but a palette of symbols, like punctuation marks, that aid the writer to express. Every emoji has an official, distinct Unicode name in English. While most of us may never encounter these names, they are essential for visually impaired users that rely on screen readers. This means that the translation and localisation of emoji names are required too.
How Emoji can be used in Marketing and Localisation campaigns
In 2015, Finland lived up to its techy reputation and became the first country in the world to publish an assemblage of government-issued emoji. The 56 symbols paint a range of cultural artefacts and experiences — everything from the famous rice-filled Karelian pasty to the sauna, bilberry and baby box.
The most prevalent way in which businesses use emoji is through their marketing campaigns. For instance, Domino’s Pizza made good use of the Pizza slice emoji for a Twitter campaign which had people all around the world tweeting the brand with the emoji to order a pizza.
Similarly KFC too indulged in an “Order through emoji campaign” as a part of its Marketing efforts.
Almost all of us use emoticons and emoji in communicating with friends and business associates. We also find these small images increasingly used past personal messaging. But diverse cultures around the world tend to gravitate to various emoji. In a study of more than 1 billion emoji sent by millions of users all over the globe, SwiftKey catalogued some fascinating trends:
- Arabic speakers use the flower 🌼 and plant emoji four times more than average. Their particular favourite being the rose. What doesn’t come as a surprise is that the Arab-speaking people use two-thirds more sun ☀️ and heat-related emoji than any other language.
- French speakers prefer the heart emoji 💖, using them four times more than speakers of other languages. No wonder it is kenned far and wide as the language of romance!
- Russian speakers are incredibly romantic, using more romantic emoji than the rest by three times but seem to be lagging a bit on the humour front. They seem to be mainly occupied with the weather 🌧️ and snowflakes ❄️.
- Canadians use money emoji 💸 twice as frequently.
- Americans are the most significant users of LGBTQ+ emoji, such as rainbows 🌈 and same-sex couples 👨❤️💋👨.
In a nutshell, it’s safe to say that the world is happy in general, with the ‘wink’ emoji or the ‘guffaw-with-tears-streaming-down-your-face’ emoji making up for more than half of the cumulative emoji usage. Furthermore, looking at the geographical takeaways from the results of the study, one can harmlessly conclude that there are prominent individual perceptions between the ways emoji are used by the people of one region speaking a particular language and those living elsewhere and speaking a different language. The emoji is not only dominating the human conversation but is breaking down language barriers for brands as well.
By Ira Mahajan
Team Loc-N-Apps
