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:-D MILLENNIALS REJOICE! New emoji Bible translation is coming!

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'What's amazing about emojis, and what's made them so successful, is that they're language-agnostic.'

In an attempt to make the Bible more interactive and entertaining to millennials, the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible has been translated with help from popular emoticons.

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Highlights

By Kenya Sinclair (CALIFORNIA NETWORK)
Catholic Online (https://www.catholic.org)
5/26/2016 (7 years ago)

Published in Living Faith

Keywords: Emoji Bible, Millennials, iTunes, translation, Scripture

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to The Memo, the new Bible, marked as "Scripture for millennials," will be available on iTunes May 29.

The authors of the new translation, described only by a smiley emoticon wearing sunglasses, hope the new Bible will draw in a younger audience and make them interested in reading Scripture.


"What's amazing about emojis, and what's made them so successful, is that they're language-agnostic - they allow you to convey an idea to anyone, regardless of what language they speak," the creators said, adding: "A major goal of this whole process was to take a book that I think is very non-approachable to lay readers and try to make it more approachable by removing a lot of its density."

Critics, of course, worry over what it means to removing anything from the Bible at all, but the author simply responded: "I've received a lot of tweets, some very nice some very, not nice. But it's all worth the goal of making the Bible a little more approachable, to inject some levity, and to get people to look at it, with no particular agenda beyond that.

"The Bible has a lot of old language, there's a lot of nuance involved in translating it - a lot of the time, you need to think beyond 1-to-1 fit. There's a lot of trial and error, and a lot of rereading."

Initially, the creators launched an emoji translator to get an idea of how the KJV could be visualized.

"You start with emojis that are really common - for instance, the earth emoji can mean earth, world, or planet. Eventually I created an actual translator program with a list of 80 different emoji icons, and 200 corresponding words. In addition: I build in some common shorthand - and so that 'and' became &, and 'first' became 1st."

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