English to Emoji – Yandex Translate | Hacker News Reader

English to Emoji – Yandex Translate

translate.yandex.com

87 pointsuwu20 comments

The coolest thing here is the Emoji to English translation, IMO, which builds grammatically-correct sentences from an unlimited number of emojis. Translating english -> emoji -> english makes for some interesting mistranslations.

It's good enough that I'm wondering whether they're drawing off recent english->emoji translations to reverse emojis back to the source material.

Example of Edgar Allan Poe's Tell-Tale Heart:

English:

>True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

(Emoji doesn't display properly on HN or I'd quote it here, but it's encoded into the URL here [1])

Translating the emoji back to english:

>True! — nervous — very , very afraid of a sudden I have; but why will you say that I'm grumpy? crisis has made my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them . Above all the sense of ear acupuncture . I heard all things in heaven and earth . I heard many things in heck . The question , then , I'm grumpy? please! and understand how to consume — how calmly I can tell you the whole story .

[1] https://translate.yandex.com/?lang=emj-en&text=%E2%9D%8C%20%....

This is amazing. I think it is trained on well-known works. Opening of the Raven, translated to English->Emoji->English:

Once upon a night of despair, while I was thinking, weak and weary,

Over the many compelling and curious volume of forgotten tales —

While I nodded, nearly asleep, suddenly there came a tap, Only a weak resume, write my chamber door.

"'Tis the information," I muttered, " tapping my chamber door — Only this and nothing more .”

So... it started out with Hello world. Ok. That made me think of the Hilltop Singers and the amusements of things like "Sprit in the sky" becoming "whisky in the heavens" when translated to Spanish and back.

So... on a random "lets see what it does"...

I want to give the world a hug -- https://translate.yandex.com/?lang=en-emj&text=I%20want%20to...

to which it appears to redirect to https://translate.yandex.com/?lang=en-emj&text=I%20want%20to... for some reason... and I get it ending with a rhinoceros.

If you watch, you can see it briefly have a hug emoji... before replacing it with the rhinoceros.

If you click on hug and click cancel autocorrection it will be hug instead of rhino.

Reminds me of Chrome's "Translate to emoji" April fools ( https://chrome.googleblog.com/2014/04/a-faster-mobiler-web-w... )

Happy to report all the swear words work perfectly and each have an emoji that makes perfect sense.

Interesting because it's not working as I expected to at all for "naughty" words and emojis

I call it something else: https://translate.yandex.com/?lang=emj-en&text=%F0%9F%90%B6%...

Funny, I recently made a site to encode English into emoji. Not just English, any text really. I call it face64 (like base64) https://face64.me

Really funny. It seems not restricted in English. Any language can be translated to Emoji and I found it did work.

I wonder why 'My native land' gets translated with flags for American Samoa and Somalia.

“Make it so” is so on point :)

Give it a go and you’ll see that they have a long way to go… Cool POC, though.

Yeah. “Its lit” gets translated into :hand_pointing_right::flashlight: rather than :fire:, which is actually pretty funny, and it translates :fax::person_gesturing_no::printer: to fax no printer, which is technically correct, but it would be way cooler if it translated it to something traditional like “thats a fact!”.

One of the problems with translating emoji is that their are some combinations that are references to memes, it utterly fails at translating :raised hand: :ice cream: :hand pointing right: :broccoli: (giving “hand cream this asparagus”, lol) a combination that would (very) roughly translate to someone not familiar with the drake meme to something along the lines of “I’m not about sweets/junk food, I’m about eating clean”.

Seems like a really good idea, but likely a tough problem especially because I expect emoji usage to continue to evolve rapidly.

Neat idea, but my hat goes off to anyone who can figure out what means...

Yandex's Emoji-to-English translation engine seems to be able to figure it out!

Seriously ... https://translate.yandex.com/?lang=emj-en&text=%F0%9F%91%89%....

classic emoticons aren't translated though ;)

funny to see it here

this thing is already 4-5 years old at this point

Wonder how long this will fly

https://translate.yandex.com/?lang=en-emj&text=communism%20r...

and another side https://translate.yandex.com/?lang=en-emj&text=capitalism%20....

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