Interpretation of Emotionally Expressive Characters in an Intercultural Communication

This paper reports an early result of an evaluation experiment of emotionally expressive characters for intercultural communication. The experiment was conducted as a series of discussions on a multilingual BBS with expressive characters between China and Japan. The result shows some characters and facial expressions used in the experiment were interpreted completely differently and used for different purposes between Chinese and Japanese participants. As emoticons are widely used for international business communications as well as daily casual ones via instant messengers, this finding rises an important research questions, i.e., what is an appropriate character representation for intercultural communication, what kind of character traits are suitable for intercultural representation, what kind of facial expressions are universally understood and interpreted, and so on.