Fred Benenson and Chris Mulligan are trying to raise $15,000 to fund The Emoji Translation Project, which includes building a digital translation engine, as well as publishing a phrasebook that translates emoji.
The phrasebook has practical applications and should help readers order a bottle of wine or find the American Embassy when traveling abroad. Here is more about their approach from the project’s Kickstarter page:
To build any translation engine requires massive amounts of text that exists in both languages, which are sometimes called parallel texts, explains the Kickstarter page. There’s plenty of content around the web in English, but there’s not that much in emoji. Thats why we’re raising money on Kickstarter: we want to pay people to translate sentences into emoji.
This is the second emoji-related project from Benenson, who published an emoji translation of Herman Melville’s classic “Moby Dick” called Emoji Dick in 2009.