Fred Benenson and Chris Mulligan are trying to raise $15,000 through Kickstarter to fund their brainchild, The Emoji Translation Project, which consists of a digital dictionary and print phrasebook that will translate emoji into English. The book will be the first of its kind, according to the page, and CHIPS, a local design firm based in Brooklyn, will print the phrasebooks.

What’s more: the money will be used to pay people to translate sentences into emoji. “We’re estimating we’ll need between $4,000 and $7,000 to pay translators to ensure a viable translation engine. The rest of the money raised by this project will go to creating and shipping rewards,” write the project creators.

“We will then use those sentences to train a translation engine powered by statistics and machine learning,” they continue. “This method goes beyond a simple find-and-replace system, and actually models how ideas are represented in emoji, and then how simple ideas are composed to communicate complex ideas.

“The end result will be an algorithm capable of translating any phrase from English to emoji (and back, we hope).”

This isn’t Benenson’s first foray into emoji-related projects; he also published an emoji-translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick called Emoji Dick in 2009.

Learn more about the project on its Kickstarter page or read an emoji poem written by Jenny Browne with translations by Carrie Fountain and Michele Battiste at The Rumpus.