Il codice emoji da Oriente a Occidente: standard Unicode e dinamiche di internazionalizzazione

In our “electronic global village” the emoji code is widespread and used worldwide on different devices by people of different cultures. The emoji character set was standardized by Unicode in 2010 and since then it has become a global iconography, considered a universal code useful to break language barriers and to ease the communication in multilingual contexts. This contribution will look at the standardization contexts of the emoji code, by analysing the semiotic and pragmatic aspects in an intercultural and interlinguistic perspective. The analysis is based on an experiment carried out at “L’Orientale” University of Naples, consisting of an inter-semiotic translation from emoji into Chinese by a group of Chinese students using Emojiworldbot on Telegram.