Digital Lab #5: Tell Us in Your Own Words ~OR~ Here I Go Again

Once again into the fray with emoji’s (See Lost in Translation)! This time, I created my own story in emojis, and it was much harder than I expected it to be!

For some reason, I thought we were supposed to make a poem of some sort, and I had a song stuck in my head, so I attempted to base my story off of a song or two (comment below if you can tell which songs!). Based on my knowledge of the songs, I attempted to create a story that tied the two together. Because of the small amount of emojis I had, and the difficulty of writing with them, I think that this project was more limiting than simply translating a chapter from Xu Bing’s Book From the Ground. The most frustrating thing, though, was that all the emojis changed (and some didn’t show up at all!) after I shared it with my project partner on Google Docs. It looked just how I wanted it to before I shared it, and then everything changed when the fire nation attacked.

Fortunately, my partner was awesome and was still able to make sense of my story and translate it!

Somehow, he translated my terrible emoji storytelling skills into a story that was pretty accurate to what I was getting at. He did think that my character traveled to France, when the flag I used was actually a Russian flag (that is what the “RU” means on the document above). But the fact that my character traveled came across still, which is the important part. The translation was also skewed because I was not able to differentiate between different characters of the same gender very easily in emojis. For this reason, he thought that I meant to say “I don’t feel lucky to be in France” but what I meant to say was “[Another person] doesn’t know how lucky he is to be in Russia.” I bring this up because I used the same set of emojis to say this multiple times.

My partner did also understand my transition segment. While in Russia (or France), my character went to the beach with a woman, but it began to storm. He got that right. Then he inferred that my character instead took his date to a restaurant called the “Octopus House.” Which is a cool name if you ask me. However, what I had intended was for my characters to dive into the ocean and then find a literal octopus’s house where they hung out.

(Sidenote: Does anyone know if octopuses live in homes? Or do they just roam around? I think it would be cute if they had little nests or something.)

The story still has a happy ending though! My partner translated that when the storm was over, my character and his date fell in love. Which is what I intended to happen in my story. Yay! Go character!

Reading the translation of the story, I really appreciated my partner’s creative liberties with expounding upon certain aspects of the story. I also really enjoyed his word choices in his translation, they made the story feel relatable and authentic, in my opinion.

Overall, my interpretation of “Literature by the Numbers” has not changed much since my last post. But it was still fun to play around with emojis, and it was interesting to see how my partner translated my story!

Thanks for reading!