: telephone: : person: : sailboat: : whale: : okhand: ; or "Call me Ishmael" - How do you translate emoji?

We report on an exploratory analysis of Emoji Dick, a project that leverages crowdsourcing to translate Melvilleu0027s Moby Dick into emoji. This distinctive use of emoji removes textual context, and leads to a varying translation quality. In this paper, we use statistical word alignment and part-of-speech tagging to explore how people use emoji. Despite these simple methods, we observed differences in token and part-of-speech distributions. Experiments also suggest that semantics are preserved in the translation, and repetition is more common in emoji.