评论
打印
It started about six months ago, with a smiley face here and there, a sequence of pictograph red hearts when friends would send baby pictures or a string of blown kisses to say good night. I especially liked the face with a toothy, uncomfortable-looking grimace: "Yikes," it seemed to say. Perfect for "I'm sorry I'm late!" or "Eek, it's 1 p.m. and I just woke up."
这开始于六个月之前，一张笑脸到处都是，朋友发婴儿照片给你时会附上一串红心符号，或者用一串亲吻的符号来代表“晚安”。我特别喜欢这样一张露着牙齿，表情不爽的鬼脸，好像在说“哎呀”。它正好可以用来代表“抱歉我迟到了！”或者“呀，都下午一点了，我刚醒。”
Eventually I was replacing words with characters, adding a series of flexing biceps to the encouraging "you can do it!" text. Then one day I spent a full 10 minutes obsessing over the perfect way to say "I'm a writer. I don't do math" in a message to my accountant: [Girl symbol] (meaning me) + [Pen and paper] (writer) + [calculator] (math) = "?!?!?" Right, it doesn't sound so complicated. But by finding said emoji, putting them in sequence and spacing them out, I could have typed the statement 17 times. Mid-composition, I got a phone call from a source I had been waiting to talk to. I pressed ignore.
最后，我用符号代替了文字，发消息鼓励别人“你能做到！”之后一定加上一堆二头肌的符号。有一天我花了10分钟给我的会计发短信，想用最酷炫的方式告诉她“我是作家，我不懂数学”，结果是：[女孩]（代表我）+[纸笔]（代表作家）+[计算器]（代表数学）=“？！？！？”。是的，这听上去并不复杂，但是，我找到相应的表情符号，用一定顺序排列，并用空格隔开，所有这些所需的时间，够我用文字敲出这句话17次了。写到一半时，一个我等着采访的消息源给我打来电话，我却按了拒绝接听键。
This was emoji chaos; it had to stop.
这就是emoji带来的混乱，不能再这样下去了。
The roots of smiley faces and emoticons go back to the 1880s, but the story of the emoji, those little pictorial icons on your cellphone, began in Japan in the mid-1990s when it was added as a special feature to a brand of pagers popular with teenagers. It wasn't until 2008 that a uniform emoji alphabet was created (the idea was to minimize inconsistency across platforms), and Apple adopted it in 2011, adding it to its iOS5 operating system.
这些笑脸与表情符号的根源可以追溯到19世纪80年代，但是你手机里这些emoji符号则发源于20世纪90年代中期的日本，由一个在青少年中非常流行的寻呼机品牌首先用来给自己增加点特色。到2008年才有了统一的emoji“字母表”（用意在于减少各种平台中的不一致），2011年，苹果公司使用了它们，把它们加入到iOS5操作系统中去。
But what was once the domain of tech geeks and Honshu tweens has infected the masses. Emoji was crowned as this year's top-trending word by the Global Language Monitor, and it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary (funny, because it's a word that describes the concept of not actually using words). There is now a blog, Emojanalysis, that purports to psychoanalyze users' most frequently used emoji (take a screenshot and send); a beta site, Emoj.li, for the first emoji-only social network (yes, as in only emoji); and the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit devoted to emoji standardization across platforms, recently said it would add 250 emoji to Apple, Microsoft and Google products. I seriously considered adding an emoji sequence to my résumé this week.
这种符号原本属于技术狂人和日本少年，如今却影响了大众。“全球语言监督”机构把"emoji"这个词评为今年的最流行语，牛津英语词典还收入了这个单词（这很有趣，因为它是一个用来描述并不真正使用单词的概念的单词）。有一个博客名叫"emoji解析”(Emojanalysis)，通过对用户最常使用的符号，对用户进行心理分析（可以截屏并发送给它）；名叫Emoj.li的试用版网站是第一个只使用emoji符号（是的，只有emoji）的社交网络；Unicode协定免费令emoji符号在各平台上实现了标准化，最近它宣布，将在苹果、微软和谷歌产品中加入250个新的emoji符号。我认真地考虑这星期在我的简历里也加上一段用emoji写的话。
"A guy just asked me out in emoji [wineglass] + [boy-girl faces] + [?]," a friend told me, when I asked if she thought we had reached an emoji tipping point. "We carried on an emoji-only conversation for about 45 minutes."
我问一个朋友，emoji表情符的使用是不是已经到了临界点了，她告诉我，“一个男人用emoji‘[高脚杯]+[男孩-女孩脸]+[问号]约我出去，后来我们就只用emoji聊了45分钟。”
According to the website Emojitracker, which uses Twitter to calculate emoji usage, people are averaging 250 to 350 emoji tweets a second. Smiley faces and hearts abound, but there are more complicated sequences, too. There's emoji as punctuation [excited face], as emphasis [sob], as a replacement for words ("Can't wait for [palm trees] [sun] [swim]!") or to replace words altogether. (The accompanying emoji graphic, recently sent by a friend, describes a weekend date that started out well, including a trip to the vineyards of Sonoma County, but then ended with her realization that the relationship would go no further. Hence: a frustrated face symbol.)
Emojitracker网站统计了Twitter上的emoji使用情况，发现在Twitter上，人们平均每秒使用250到350个emoji符号。笑脸和心形符号用得很多，但也有一些更为复杂的序列。人们用emoji作为标点[兴奋的脸]，作为强调[哭泣的脸]，代替文字（“等不及去[棕榈树][太阳][游泳]！”）或者用来代替许多文字（文中附上的emoji表情图是一个朋友最近发来的，用来描述周末的约会进展顺利，去了索诺玛郡的葡萄园旅行，但后来她发现两人的关系不可能再进一步。于是出现了一张沮丧的脸）。
There is emoji for when you don't really know what to say, but don't want to be rude by not responding [Thumbs up], and for when you just don't really want to respond at all. "I love emoji because I don't like to make small talk," one woman said. There are emoji sequences to express real-life concepts, too. "In the wake of the Hobby Lobby ruling," said Caroline McCarthy, a start-up consultant, "I created an emoji sequence for ‘vasectomy.' " It was: [scissors], [eggplant], [screaming face].
在你不知道该说什么好，但是不做回答又显得太粗鲁的时候，也可以使用emoji符号[大拇指朝上]，还有的符号适合你根本不想回答对方的时候。“我喜欢emoji是因为我不喜欢闲聊，”一个女人说。一串emoji符号也可以用来表达真实生活中的概念。“在关于霍比·罗比连锁店(Hobby Lobby)的判决出来之后，”创业顾问卡洛琳·麦卡锡(Caroline McCarthy)说，“我用emoji组成了一个短语，代表‘输精管切除术'。是[剪刀]，[茄子]，[尖叫]。”
In their short life, emoji managed to find an exceptional cultural range: One Internet wit put out an emoji translation of Beyoncé's "Drunk in Love," and an emoji-only version of "Moby Dick," called "Emoji Dick," was recently accepted into the Library of Congress. Legal experts have even discussed whether an emoji death threat [gun and face] could be admissible in court. "I'm not sure you can really speak of it as a full-fledged language yet," said Ben Zimmer, a linguist, "but it does seem to have fascinating combinatorial possibilities. Any sort of symbolic system, when it's used for communication, is going to develop dialects."
在它诞生后的短短时间里，emoji构成了一个独特的文化圈子：一个互联网达人用emoji表情翻译了碧昂斯(Beyoncé)的《醉在爱里》(Drunk in Love)，还有emoji版的《白鲸》(Moby Dick)被称为"Emoji Dick"，最近被国会图书馆收藏。法律专家甚至讨论用emoji符号表达的死亡威胁[枪支与脸]在法庭上是否可以作为证据。“我不能确定目前是否能将它作为一种成熟的语言，”语言学家本·齐默(Ben Zimmer)说，“但是它的确具有极为迷人的组合能力。任何符号系统被用于交流的时候，都会发展为一种特色语言。”
As with any new medium, there are growing pains. "Even with my glasses on, I can't see those little things very well," said Ruth Ann Harnisch, 64, a writer and philanthropist. Emoji also tend to mistranslate when sent between platforms, or they get jumbled if you don't have the right font. So while a heart may be a heart on your phone, it may end up as a series of glitch squares on Facebook or if you read your email in Chrome. (Conducting interviews about emoji, over multiple platforms, was a comedy of misinterpretations.)
正如任何新媒介一样，emoji也经历着成长的烦恼。“就算戴上眼镜，我也看不清这些小东西，”64岁的作家、慈善家罗斯·安·哈尼斯奇(Ruth Ann Harnisch)说。Emoji在不同平台上可能会导致错误转换，字体不对也有可能导致乱码。在你的手机上可能显示的是一颗心，在Facebook上或者用Chrome浏览器读邮件时，可能就成了一个错误的小方块（我为emoji做采访时，要使用各种平台，简直是一场误读的喜剧）。
The current emoji package has been criticized as too limited: not enough emoji diversity, and in the height of the summer vacation season, not even a lobster icon (no crabs, either). There's also a certain subjective quality to the sequences. Depending on whether you think the little face with the teardrop on his forehead is sweating or crying, your friend may have either just been dumped or been to SoulCycle. "I think it's clear that a rough grammar exists for emoji, or is at least emerging," said Colin Rothfels, a developer who maintains a Twitter feed, @anagramatron, that collects tweets (and thus emoji) that are anagrams.
人们批评目前emoji的表情包太有限：不够多样化，在暑假的时候，连龙虾和螃蟹的符号都没有。符号的使用也有主观性。你觉得那张脸上带水珠的小脸是代表流汗还是流泪呢？不知道给你发这个表情符的朋友是被人甩了，还是去健身房了。“我想emoji表情符中显然存在一种粗糙的语法，至少这种语法正在形成，”开发者柯林·罗斯菲尔斯(Colin Rothfels)说，他的Twitter账号是@anagramatron，专门收集各种由颠倒字母（也包括emoji表情）顺序而构成的Twitter句子。
The Unicode Consortium, the agency that governs this sort of thing, is in the process of rolling out its new emoji icons — including a hot pepper (hot or spicy) and a man in a business suit levitating (jump). And yet, more options may only exacerbate a problem well known to those fluent in emoji-speak (or at least this person fluent in it): With no standardized keyboard, how are we supposed to sort through all of those options?
管理这类事宜的Unicode协定目前正在发布新的emoji符号——其中包括辣椒符号（好辣），以及一个穿西服的男人身在半空（跳）。不过，更多的选择可能会令擅长使用emoji交谈的人们（至少是我这个擅长用emoji交谈的人）本来就有的问题变得更严重：没有标准化的键盘，我们该怎样查看整理这些新的选择？
It's enough to make anyone want to [scream face].
这真让人想要[尖叫]。
