🖋 emoji poetry, translated from chinese

23 May 2022

This poem is the focus of 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a “classic study of translation” which compares how different translators have rendered 鹿柴. As an exploration in communication and poetry, I translated this and another poem, 月夜憶舍弟, into emoji.

When translating, I like to see a pretty translation and a gloss translation.

For 月夜憶舍弟, pretty translations came from David Hinton, Stephen Owen, Witter Bynner, and David Young. I sought out a gloss as well, at first in Google Translate (by gradually separating the characters from each other) and then in the MDBG Chinese Dictionary.

Here's Google Translate version of 月夜憶舍弟, unadulterated, from January 2020.

Drumming breaks the pedestrian, Bianqiu a wild goose.
Lu Cong is white tonight, and the month is hometown.
All the younger brothers were scattered, and the family asked about life and death.
The length of the book to be sent was not reached, and the condition was not a truce.

Although it doesn’t capture the poetry or a good chunk of the meaning, look! There are no personal pronouns, unlike some human translations. I actually like the last couple of lines of this.

In my emoji translation, I have tried to take into account the character choice of the Mandarin and the CLDR descriptions and text that accompanies emoji. This is in an effort to reflect the original beauty of Chinese and to create a translation that can be perceived similarly on different platforms. While I haven’t found a convenient way to view how my emoji translation varies from platform to platform (currently building this), I was amused by the differences between my phone and computer.

With 鹿柴 / 🦌🏞️, I glanced at the Google translation, but I found myself surprised that I could read it. Not perfectly, but the characters are simpler, within the grasp of someone who is roughly HSK 3.

Because of this ‘simplicity’, I decided to try to keep to the Chinese a little bit more, though the third line has some deviation from the original. I’d almost call it significant, but then I look at some of the poems in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei and think that it is hardly significant at all.

(This is a modified version of work done in January 2020.)

humanities poetry translation linguistics emoji chinese