The efforts of Fred Benenson have finally come to fruition: Emoji Dick, a translation of the great American classic Moby Dick into Emojis, is complete and available for purchase. And believe us when we say it's an epic: Benenson raised more than $3,500 on Kickstarter for the project, and employed a host of strangers to translate every sentence of Herman Melville's 1851 novel. Each line of the long, long book was translated three times, using a different range of Emojis for each version. Finally, another group of strangers-for-hire voted on the best versions of each sentence, and the winning lines made it into the final version of Emoji Dick.
And now, Emoji Dick can be yours — for just $200 for a hard-backed cover, or $40 for a soft-backed version. Good Lord. "Seriously, why?" demanded the New Yorker's Book Bench at the outset of the project. Benenson utilized Amazon's Mechanical Turk service for the project, meaning Benenson himself got to sit back and act as editor and coordinator. The Mechanical Turk feature on Amazon is essentially a job board: employers post what they're looking for, and individuals sign up to do the work for a specified fee. EmojiDick.com informs us that "Each worker was paid five cents per translation and two cents per vote per translation." So, you know, the Emoji app didn't facilitate slave labor or anything.
Credits:
https://www.bustle.com/articles/9208-emoji-dick-moby-dick-translated-into-emoji-icons-this-exists
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