Question marks and exclamation marks are "symbols", and they've always served to "replace" full stops / periods. And I personally find it very annoying if when I "cut & paste" a command to enter into my Linux terminal, I accidentally copy a period that some misguided "proofreader" has added to a bit of text online. But punctuation is for representing true natural language, not "dingbatty" text with symbols. I'd solve the problem by discarding the symbols, not the periods.

@FumbleFingers In this case, as a rule, the symbols must be retained from the original text.

♡ and ☆ aren't part of written English, so you shouldn't expect to be able to incorporate them as if they were. I don't think this question is really about "the English language" at all.

> "so you shouldn't expect to be able to incorporate them as if they were" While I do somewhat agree with that, de-facto there are a lot of situations where symbols appear in-line with English text. More legitimately than hearts and stars perhaps, but mathematical symbols or schematic symbols would be examples. Also, if I can't ask this here, I'm not sure where it would be more appropriate to ask. Also, if I may infer, if the symbols are not to be treated as text, then they also should not be treated as punctuation, so taking the place of a period and omitting said period would be wrong.

Maybe in whatever language you're translating from, people are accustomed to seeing symbols mixed in with text, but Anglophones don't do this much. Under normal circumstances I'd suppose a heart meant something to do with "love", but I confess I have no idea what the two symbols in your example text are supposed to mean. I'd just remove them as a pointless distraction, quite apart from your formatting problems.

I would remove them in order to retain the proper punctuation, just as you implied in your first comment, but the rule is that I have to retain them. I'm basically being forced to make the text less readable by the post-editors. These post-editors are also mostly English majors and everyone in this situation is a native English speaker/Anglophone - so I hope you can appreciate how frustrating this is to me being forced to remove what both you (an English major working as a software engineer) and I (a software engineer dabbling in English) think should remain in place.

Also, the symbols are being used to imply tone. The text is mostly narrative which is accompanied by images, such as text boxes in games and speech bubbles in comics. Furthermore, other than this one exception, punctuation is always required. That includes isolated text in speech bubbles where no inference the text continues can be made.

Those aren't symbols. Those are emojis and used in texting. There are no rules here at all. Do as you like. And I would never use: I suppose so♡ Sam, would you like to go too☆? It's pretty meaningless. I sorry for you because I too am a translator and hate rules invented by people who are clueless. It happens a lot.

@Lambie Unfortunately the rules here are those imposed by the post-editors, and I have to follow them. I initially posted this to gather external opinions I can use to argue my case for retaining the period. At this point though, I think I'm going to argue that the period must be included and symbols should receive no special exceptions to other symbols or text.

This is just an opinion question. That said, if they accept "I suppose so♡ Sam, would you like to go too☆?", what does that even mean? Yeah, post-editors, I know them well. It's amazing how many times I have had to argue with them since they often don't understand translation and/or are also clueless with English.

It's increasingly common to omit periods in text messages, so omitting them after emojis would be consistent in very informal contexts (they're also frequently omitted in graffiti and slogans on clothing). But the only rule is do what your boss says; the rest is opinion.

@StuartF That article would be completely applicable if periods were omittable in all text boxes/speech bubbles, but in every situation other than a sentence ending in a symbol they are not. According to my boss, periods must not be omitted. However, if the sentence ends in a symbol/emoji, periods must be omitted. As of yesterday, these are the rules my boss has set, and this makes no sense to me.

My friend, I am a native English speaker who's been in the translation saddle for many moons. They may be English majors, but this ain't English. If they want to interpose an emoji like that, so be it. I just wonder what they mean in those positions. I agree with grammarly 8. Put emojis after the punctuation in a sentence. In English, we generally place symbols at the end of a sentence, which is why it’s time to formalize this rule when using emojis with other writing. If you’re going to include an emoji (or a series of emojis) in your sentence, add them after your punctuation. ///See?♡

grammarly.com/blog/11emoji-grammar-tips-to-save-your-texts/…‌​.

There seems to be a parallel here with punctuation and emojis.

You said the rule only pertains to periods. You need a comma after the heart emoji here — so no conflict: “I suppose so♡, Sam, would you like to go too☆?”