A free tool that translates the hidden meanings of the ’emojis’ that young people exchange with each other in messages on social networks has been developed by a Portuguese computer security expert and is being shared globally.
The translator, designed to be used by parents of children and teenagers, was created by David Sopas, a computer security researcher based in Figueira da Foz, in central Portugal, inspired, in part, for the theme, by the series “Adolescence”, a hit on the streaming platform Netflix, but also by conversations with friends who have teenage children.
“It was, in part, the Netflix series, which I thought was fantastic and which gave a new vision of the use of ’emojis’, which I had no idea about,” David Sopas told Lusa news agency today.
Concern for his own daughter, who “is not yet a teenager, she is six years old, but she is heading there”, and conversations with friends who have older children, and who commented on “some problems they have with ‘sexting’ [exchanging erotic messages via mobile phone or in chats on social networks] or ‘cyberbullying’ [aggressive behaviour via the internet]”, led the computer security specialist to act.
The simple tool, available for free at https://dsopas.github.io/emoji-translator/ was developed after researching the content in question, namely the ’emojis’ that young people usually use and that adults “have no idea what they are for”.
“An apple, to me, is an apple,” David Sopas noted – but it can also be a way of showing affection – as well as the double meaning of some terms and the combination of several ’emojis’ to build sentences.
This use by younger people also serves “to get around some situations, which I presume were monitoring ‘software’ that blocked some conversation topics” in the applications used and which was used by someone to create a language based on symbols for general use on the internet, he noted.
On Wednesday, David Sopas began sharing the computer tool — available in English to have a greater scope and global character — and was surprised by the impact it had and the massive sharing across his networks, particularly at an international level.
The specialist has already received a few requests to translate the tool into Portuguese, starting with the MiúdosSegurosNa.Net project, by Tito de Morais, and, due to lack of time, he replied that the translator is open source, is hosted on GitHub — a collaborative platform that brings together source code used in the production of software — and has a license that allows anyone to change it.
“The only thing I ask is that you give me credit [for the authorship]. You can translate it, you can improve the format of the page however you want, you can replicate it in your applications and you can monetize it however you want. It’s free, anyone who wants it can go to GitHub, the source code is there”, stressed David Sopas.