Emojitaliano: A Social and Crowdsourcing Experiment of the Creation of a Visual International Language

Inspired by the historical models of artificial and auxiliary languages, Emojitaliano is the result of a social and crowdsourcing experiment which was conducted by a group of seventeen translators, followers of the “Scritture brevi” blog, and led to the creation of an international language based on emojis. The experiment was carried out during 2016 on Twitter in the framework of the translation into emoji of Pinocchio, the famous Italian tale. Emojitaliano consists of 1) a repertoire of stable and coherent lexical correspondences between the emoji UNICODE set and the Italian language and 2) a set of predefined simplified rules agreed on during the translation process. Emojitaliano is stored in @Emojitalianobot, an online tool and digital environment for translation into emoji, running on Telegram, the popular instant messaging platform. It is the first open and free Emoji-Italian translation bot based on UNICODE descriptions, which contains a glossary with all the senses assigned by the translators to emojis during the translation process of the famous Italian novel. This paper presents the translation projects of Emojitaliano, the background and its lexicon and grammar and finally Emojitalianobot.