Japanese, Korean and Lithuanian. But the latest translation eschews the written word altogether, telling the story through emoji icons—the pictograms seen in text messages and e-mails.

SoftBank, a Japanese wireless carrier ... even at extremely small size, because we use emoji in text. And that's where a lot of proposals just fall flat immediately. Narrator: Proposers also ...

Japan's role in progressing this type of visual language is undeniable, from the standards set for sporting pictograms in 1964, to the Japanese term 'emoji' being used to describe digital pictograms.

An emoticon is a blend of ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’, made up of characters from a keyboard, whereas an emoji (a combination of the Japanese ‘e’ for ‘picture’ and ‘moji’ for ...

There was a surge in people using emojis in around 2008, after they were included in Unicode (a global text encoding standard for computers) for them to be displayed on devices outside Japan as well.