An American data engineer Fred Benenson has finished a project to translate the 1851 classic novel Moby‑Dick, by Herman Melville, into Emoji.
He’d set up a Kickstarter project to translate the novel’s 10,000 or so lines into Emoji on 17 Jul 2017.
The first emoji were invented in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. Way back in 2009 , texting with the small set of Japanese emoticons called ”Emoji” was still an insiders’s activity. It required downloading an app and then hacking it to enable the keyboard for everyday texts. You couldn’t just go to your iPhone settings like you can today.
The book, which now exists in tangible form ($200 for a hard copy) is translated line to line from English to Emoji.