“表情”一詞，大家都很熟悉，它似乎在每個數字相關的活動是無處不在。表情也是新時代的象形文字，這是人們對即時聊天和社交網絡平臺溝通的基本工具。從表情符號或符號作為僅僅是象征性的符號來表達感情的用戶發展，另一種形式的表情表情包（字面翻譯為中文）應運而生，成為近年來的一個模因。作為中國特色的表情符號廣泛傳播，甚至流向國外互聯網。由于文化的差異，中國的多元文化語境中的表情包遇到誤解。為此，本文討論了是否可以在跨文化傳播的表情傳達同樣的信息。在中國和其他國家的“表情”失真現象的原因是什么？

 

Introduction 簡介

“Emoji” is a word that everyone in modern times is familiar with, and it seems to be ubiquitous in every digital-related activity. Emoticons are also pictographs of the new era, which are essential tools for people to communicate on instant chatting and social networking platforms. Evolved from emoji or emoticon which served as merely symbolic signs to express feelings of users, another form of emoji called emoji package (literally translated from Chinese) has emerged and become a meme in recent years. As Chinese characteristic emoji spread widely, it even flows to abroad on the Internet. Due to cultural differences, Chinese emoji package encounters misinterpretation in multicultural context.For this reason, this article discusses whether emoji can convey the same message in cross cultural transmission. What are the reasons for the distortion phenomenon of emoji in China and other countries?

 

1. Development and popularity of emoji

Jimmy Wales (one of the founders of Wikipedia) wrote on social network: "Emoji adds humanity to messages we send."Today, emojis are sweeping over the world. According to the statistics of the global language monitoring system, emoji has become the number one popular word in the world, and has even been included in the English Dictionary of Oxford.According to the United States Swyft Media data, more than 74% Americans often use emoji or stickers, or emoticons in online exchange. They use 96 of the above expressions on average every day. Every day, over 6 billion emojis are sent on the mobile social app. Emojipedia has also been set up. Similar to Wikipedia, emojipedia is an encyclopedia website where one can check the meaning of each emoji. Instagram, an online photo sharing platform used by the most people in the world, that Obama is using is an important site for people to use emoji. Over 50% of the messages on Instagram contain emoji.

Emoji is changing our way of using network language. Since the popularity of emoji in 2011, it has gradually replaced the past popular network words, such as lol, lmao (laugh my ass off) etc. Different from these words, although we use emoji and emoticons in the chat, in fact, when our brains recognize them, it processes them as non-linguistic information, this means that we interpret them as emotional communication similar to interpretation of emotion, tone, gestures, posture, and unlike reading text and listening to language.#p#分頁標題#e#

People also use emoji to do other things, such as improving the understanding of marginalized groups, and helping improve communication. For example, the Unicode Consortium (Unicode) added "I love you" sign languages into emoji for people of different colors. In the latest version of emoji, the same emoji has a version for black skin, white skin, and yellow skin, respectively. Supporters believe that the sign language of different complexions can facilitate the communication for deaf people group, and also the communication between the deaf and the normal people. Sweden's non-profit organization BRIS thinks that emoji can help us communicate more easily with children, including those abused children. 

 

2. Emoji package in China and its cross-cultural interpretation 

Emoji package is quite popular in China, and this kind of expression attracted attention of foreign culture. English newspaper has reported Chinese emoji package a lot. In China, Chinese netizens are happy to use emoji package on Weibo. The foreign media in reporting Chinese news often includes Chinese emoji package into their contents, which actually reflects their attitude to China. Chinese emoji package becomes international gradually. 

There is an interesting example. During the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, Fu Yuanhui, a Chinese athlete, was attracting worldwide attention. Almost all the newspaper headlines have come with “prehistorical power”, Fu Yuanhui’s emoji of “prehistorical power” has also went abroad. Everybody says Fu Yuanhui is a walking emoji package girl and she is really famous after Beijing Olympic Games. Everyone thinks she is hot and cute. On Yutube, her “prehistorical power” emoji has been translated into English and has more than 120,000 hits. And all the foreign comments are surprisingly consistent - she is really cute!

There’s another example. Yao Ming, another athlete who is known by almost all the Chinese people. Yao’s emojis have also spread to foreign countries. Yao is quite popular in China for several years, but he never expected his emoji package shall spread to Africa and the Middle East one day. According to Weibo users, Yao’s emojis have even been uploaded to Luxor, one city of Egypt. It is said Yao’s emojis are quite popular there, although many people in Luxor do not know who he is, they just think it is funny. It’s not just in Luxor, Yao’s emoji package has already spread to the Egyptian market, even people there do not know that he plays basketball. On November 1, 2013, American magazine Globe has reported an article, who would have thought that Yao Ming’s face is not only popular at home, it is also popular in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and other Arab world. If walking in the streets of Egypt, if you stop by to ask someone, “do you know Yao Ming?”, ten to one he will shake his head. But if you pull out an Egyptian news and turns to “Serious But Funny” and points to the eye-catching logo and asks, “do you know this man?”, this person will definitely enlightened, repeated and nodded, “yes, i know him. Its the Chinese funny face!” As Yao has repeatedly said in public that, “it’s good to be happy. I look at it and i get used to it”. But even the Egyptian think he is really funny, unlike Chinese, he also does not have any stickers on his own cell phone. #p#分頁標題#e#

The Chinese emojis spread to foreign countries, how foreigners evaluate them? There is a famous English video, the host showed two foreigners a popular emoji package and aksed how they think about this emoji package. Both of them said it was difficult to understand the meaning of this emoji, but they said this Chinese emoticon was “very interesting and probably used with friends”. 

There is a great difference in the understanding of emoji in cross-cultural communication. In an article, “Chinese people mean something very different when they send you a smiley emoji” recently published on the U.S. website Quartz, it says, when Chinese people send you a smiley face, it is actually not conveying the literal meaning you see; the profound meaning of Chinese using emoji is given. The article says that Chinese netizens are creative and create a lot of emojis that contains a connotation of disdain. Chinese are known for creating a variety of creative and elegant emojis. Chinese have also created an emoji system that allows a subversive use of it. Therefore, the smiley may actually convey disdain.

Emojis with Chinese characteristics are very popular in China. However, they encounter communication barriers abroad. Now the distortion of emoji in different countries is becoming more and more obvious. For example: Tianjin explosion incident on the night of August 13, 2015 caused great concern to everyone. People argued a lot about whether the emoji in issue meant a "prayer" or "high five" online. It was an emoji of "putting one’s palms together". When Chinese People forwarded this explosive news with this emoji, they conveyed a meaning of praying. While some people in American social networking sites said Chinese had no compassion, and they were cold-blooded. 

 

3. The reasons of emoji-related misinterpretation

3.1 Cultural differences and behavioral habit

Emoji is essentially a popular culture. Depending on the continuous development of social networking and communication, people's way of communication has changed accordingly. The earliest word communication has gradually evolved into an increasingly diversified emoji culture, using some self-made and popular element pictures to communicate. Such pictures are mostly funny and exaggerated in composition. People can gain interest through collecting and sharing such pictures. At the same time, displaying their own collections can win recognition from others to realize psychological satisfaction.

Emoji culture is a mainstream culture with the increase in network social communication. Emoji is an evolution of the network language. Its emergence and popularity is related to its specific "living environment". The pursuit of eye-catching, novelty, banter and other effects is consistent with the extending individuality and funny mentality of young people. The reason why emoji can spread widely is that it makes up for the boring and inaccurate communication through words, and thereby effectively improves the efficiency of communication. Some emojis have the function of replacing words, and can also save the typing time. With the popularity of smart phones and the wide use of social apps, emoji has already appeared frequently in people's chat online.#p#分頁標題#e##p#分頁標題#e#

There is a lot emoji package abroad, but the western emoji package tends to be a simple picture, unlike the emoji package used by Chinese. Chinese people prefer graphic combination, and the emoji packages in other countries are not so exaggerated. Their emoji packages are small, usually are used to express pure emotion, such as happy or doubt. People like to use emojis, especially in western countries. We can find that almost everyone would use an emoji in each sentence in their text messages. Even emoji was invented by foreigners, but it seems they prefer simple expression, rather than graphic combination. Chinese netizens are creative, they create a lot of emojis that contains all kinds of emotions. Chinese people is now famous for its creative and artistic emoji package. 

 

3.2 Emotional expressions are diverse in different situations

Phlippe Schyns and his colleagues (2012) refuted the universality of basic emotions represented by Ekman through the dynamic video. In short, static pictures are too exaggerated to well reflect the situation in real life. For example, according to Ekman, westerners and easterners can judge the happy mood from the same smile photo. But Schyns believes that this static picture contains a lot of information, so everyone can judge it. But in real life, emotional expressions change gradually. People in different cultures have different understanding of the same emotion despite the general similar direction in interpreting it.

According to the study of semiologists, when people send emoji, sometimes they send it just because they have nothing to say. In this case, emoji is not so much as a carrier of emotion as it assumes a new function. People can maintain basic conversational relation at a low cost by means of using emoji. 

When people are unwilling to think about how to choice the right wording; or they are not interested in or disagree with the other party’s topic, and meanwhile they are also reluctant to spend too much energy to explain what they think; or they are distracted at the last turn and have no intention to inquire, and hope to continue the conversation directly; or people subconsciously cover up with an exaggerated emoji, as a compensation for their inattention. Sending a simple smiley face sometimes is to inform the other party: "I have received your message, but I don't know how to reply you." This expression seems to be much better than no reply in complete silence. The social network traps everyone in the overload of friend circle world in which everyone has unprecedented "acquaintances". We are increasingly feeling that our limited energy is unable to cope with such a massive dialogue network, thereby, emoji comes into being at this time.