Nothing
Well obviously they mean nothing, and are just a form of visual noise and Unicode space pollution.
'Emoji translator' sought by translations firm
London language translation firm Today Translations has advertised for an TEXT “Emoji translator/specialist.” The firm says it currently employs over 3,000 people fluent in more than 200 languages and offers you the chance to put their talent to work translating the world's tongues. Now, the ad says, the firm needs someone …
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 06:38 GMT Neil Barnes
Sometimes I despair...
We have around a million perfectly good - dare I even say 'cromulent'? - words in English.
It's four or five thousand years since we moved on from hieroglyphs and pictograms.
And yet the illiterati seem incapable of using the words and want to return us to ancient history.
Oh the embarrassment! I die of shame. My body, rotting, pollutes a water table. Disease is rife. Hundreds die. Oh, the embarrassment...
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 06:44 GMT Charles 9
Re: Sometimes I despair...
You forget two things. One, the hard SMS and Twitter character limit which ignores word count. An emoji can do in about 5 characters what may take 10 or more. Brevity counts in this medium. Two, the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words," much longer than a text could contain.
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 16:11 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
Re: Sometimes I despair...
You forget two things
Except that if you use a Unicode character in SMS, then the entire text gets promoted to UTF-16. Or at least that's the way it was the last time I looked into it. So the 5 characters you "save" are wiped out by the 144/2 characters you lose thanks to the 2-byte encoding.
Anyway, if you want to send a clear, unambiguous message then text is the way to go.
-
-
-
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 08:21 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: What a load of bollocks...
Perhaps the truth is that a picture *costs* a thousand words.
The time spent typing in two random emoji could be better spent just writing the flipping words. The time spent playing silly mind-games trying to decipher them could be better spent having sex (or whatever it was that the text interrupted). The time wasted because the meaning got garbled in transit is lost forever. The fact that professional translators think you need special skills to figure out what they mean is a really big clue that these hinder communication, not help.
Use words, you numpty, and whilst we are at it can you shit on that horrible ribbon and bring back a menu with (you've guessed it) some fucking words on it.
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 16:10 GMT John H Woods
Re: What a load of bollocks...
This is true even of UIs. Why not have words "yes" and "no" instead of ticks and crosses? And why have that weird square shape with a corner missing for "save" ...?
(I'm kidding, I'm 50, but when I dug an old 1.44 out of a cupboard to show my kids they looked at each other and said, simultaneously "OH! So that's why that means save").
-
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 14:31 GMT Charles 9
Re: What a load of bollocks...
"Anyone that claims "a picture is worth a thousand words" need only close their eyes to prove that little lump of shite to be false."
Oh? I recall it's devlishly hard to properly convey what makes the Mona Lisa so intriguing to a blind person. So my view stands. A picture can easily be worth MORE than a thousand words. In fact, the best are beyond words altogether and, sadly, beyond the ability of a sightless person to comprehend due to lack of common ground.
-
-
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 14:02 GMT Kubla Cant
Re: Competitive Salary
Any job advertisement that relies on expressions like "competitive salary" or "market rate" instead of specifying an actual figure is effectively admitting that they hope to get away with under-paying.
That's my experience, anyway. When you ask "How much is your competitive salary?", the answer is always a disappointment.
-
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 14:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why do we need all these emojis?
So how do you emoji a woman without breaking that rule? What if you want to specifically emoji a Christian cross or intentionally intend to compare it to, say, a proper Swastika or even the Nazi one? Just because an emoji is religious doesn't mean it's inherently insulting. Otherwise, someone could be mortally offended by the existence of the letter A simply because his/her name doesn't have one. Don't laugh. People have started fights for less.
-
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 13:29 GMT VinceH
"Here's one of the questions, which asks you to identify three London Underground railway stations described only with Emoji."
So as well as an ability to translate stupid icons into meaningful text, the successful candidate must also be familiar with the London Underground and its stations?
-
Wednesday 14th December 2016 14:09 GMT Kubla Cant
Saving space
The name "Seven Sisters" uses 13 bytes. As far as I know, emojis are implemented as Unicode multi-byte characters, so the rebus of seven pictures of a woman probably consumes between 14 and 28 bytes.
What's more, it doesn't specify that they're sisters. They're all identical, so it should be the little-known station Monozygotic Female Septuplets.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
