Himdad A. Muhammad1 & Sangar Hassan Najim2
1Salahaddin University, Erbil, Iraq
2Ministry of Education – Kurdistan, KRG, Erbil, Iraq
Abstract: Due to the polysemous and ambiguous nature of the emojis, translators encounter difficulties in rendering them into Kurdish. This paper is an attempt to find out the nature and the frequency of the problems related to emojis and suggest more appropriate ways for dealing with them when they are translated into Kurdish. The paper takes up a descriptive-analytic approach. The data of the study is collected primarily from the ‘Emoji movie’ produced in 2017. The data are then categorized and analyzed thoroughly to explore the underlying factors of these problems and suggest effective strategies for translating them with minimum ambiguity. The results of this study show that polysemous emojis could be disambiguated through the context and other extralinguistic factors such as the setting and the technological background of the translators.
Keywords: Emoji Ambiguity, Emoji Translation, Polysemy
doi: 10.23918/ijsses.v10i1p218
Published: February 19, 2023
References:
Allen, James P., (2010). Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture Of Hieroglyphs. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.
Benenson, F., (2010). Emoji Dick; or the Whale. https://emojidick.com.
Berliner, M. (2020). When a Picture is Not Worth a Thousand Words: Why Emojis Should Not Satisfy the Statute of Frauds’ Writing Requirement. Cardozo Law Review. Jun2020, Vol. 41 Issue 5, p2161-2201. 41p.
Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Częstochowska, J., Gligoric, K., Peyrard, M., Mentha, Y., Bień, M., Grutter, A., Auer, A., Xanthos, A., West, R., (2022). On the Context-Free Ambiguity of Emoji: A Data-Driven Study of 1,289 Emojis. Available at: https://researchgate.net/publication/357926924_On_the_Context-Free_Ambiguity_of_Emoji_A_Data-Driven_Study_of_1289_Emojis [accessed Feb 26 2022].
Dresner, E., & Herring, S. C. (2010). Functions of the nonverbal in CMC: Emoticons and illocutionary force. Communication theory, 20(3), 249-268. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01362.x (PDF) Emoticons as Self-Disclosure in social media and Its Meaning for People Who are Deaf. Available from: https://researchgate.net/publication/358318699_Emoticons_as_Self-Disclosure_in_Social_Media_and_Its_Meaning_for_People_Who_are_Deaf [accessed Feb 26 2022].
Dürscheid, C., & Siever, C. M. (2017). Beyond the Alphabet–Communication ofEmojis. Retrieved from preprint available at: https://researchgate.net/publication/315674101_Beyond_the_Alphabet_-_Communication_with_Emojis.
Garfield Tenzer, L. Y., & Cangro, A. (2021) An Emoji Legal Dictionary, University of Pittsburgh Law Review, 83(5). doi: 10.5195/lawreview.2022.834. available at: https://lawreview.law.pitt.edu/ojs/lawreview/article/view/834 . [Accessed March 10, 2022].
Krohn, F. B. (2004). A Generational Approach to Using Emoticons as Nonverbal Communication. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 34(4), 321–328. https://doi.org/10.2190/9EQH-DE81-CWG1-QLL9
Menscher, K., (2021). Thank you, I Emoji your Offer: Emojis Translating Acceptance in Contracts. Seton Hall University. Available at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2266&context=student_scholarship
Miller, H., Thebault-Spieker, J., Chang, S., Johnson, I., Terveen, L., & Hecht, B. (2021) “Blissfully Happy” or ‘Ready toFight’: Varying Interpretations of Emoji”, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 10(1), pp. 259-268. Available at: https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14757 (Accessed: 4 February 2022).
Miller, H.; Kluver, D., Thebault-Spieker, J., Terveen, L., & Hecht, B. (2017). Understanding Emoji Ambiguity in Con-text: The Role of Text in Emoji-Related Miscommunication. AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)
Kralj, Novak P., Smailović, J., Sluban, B., & Mozetič, I. (2015) Sentiment of Emojis. PLoS ONE 10(12): e0144296. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0144296
Ptaszynski, M., Maciejewski, J., Dybala, P., Rzepka, R., Araki, K., & Momouchi, Y. (2012). Science of Emoticons: Research Framework and State of the Art in Analysis of Kaomoji-Type Emoticons. In U. S. Tiwary, & T. J. Siddiqui (Eds.), Speech, Image, and Language Processing for Human Computer Interaction (pp. 234-257). Allahabad, India: IGI, USA.
Robertson, A., Liza, F.F., Nguyen, D., McGillivray, B., & Hale, S.A. (2021). Semantic Journeys: Quantifying Change in Emoji Meaning from 2012-2018. ArXiv, abs/2105.00846.
Raymond, E. S. (1996). The new hacker’s dictionary (3rd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sanjaya Wijeratne, Lakshika Balasuriya, emojisimilarityAmit Sheth, and Derek Doran. (2017). A semantics-based measure of. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence. ACM, 646–653. Available from: https://researchgate.net/publication/341155321_Emoji_Understanding_and_Applications_in_Social_Media_Lay_of_the_Land_and_Special_Issue_Introduction [accessed Mar 20 2022].
Shurick, A. A., & Daniel, J. (2020). What’s behind those smiling eyes: Examining emoji sentiment across vendors. Workshop Proceedings of the 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. available at: shorturl.at/cprwT [accessed Mar 15 2022].
Wicke, P., & Cunha, J., (2020). An Approach for Text-to-Emoji Translation. Online available at: shorturl.at/aoqCI. [Accessed March 4, 2022].
Wicke, P. (2017). Ideograms as semantic primes: Emoji in computational linguistic creativity. Thesis for: Bachelor of Science. Universität Osnabrück. Online available at: shorturl.at/avB15. [accessed Mar 13 2022].
Wijeratne, S. (2018). A Framework to Understand Emoji Meaning: Similarity and Sense Disambiguation of Emoji using EmojiNet. Wright State University. PhD dissertation. Online available at: shorturl.at/anuSU [accessed Mar 21 2022].
Wijeratne, S., Balasuriya, L., Sheth, A., & Doran, D. (2016). Emojinet: Building a machine readable sense inventory for emoji. In 8th Intl. Conf. on Social Informatics.
International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies
ISSN 2520-0968 (Online), ISSN 2409-1294 (Print), January 2023, Vol.10, No.1