Tower of Babel in Cross-Cultural Communication: A Case Study of #Give Me a Chinese Name# Dialogues During the "TikTok Refugees'' Event
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arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866911461087903744 |
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| author | Feng, Jielin Yang, Zhibo Zhao, Jingyi Li, Yujia Ye, Xinwu Lan, Xingyu Chen, Siming |
| author_facet | Feng, Jielin Yang, Zhibo Zhao, Jingyi Li, Yujia Ye, Xinwu Lan, Xingyu Chen, Siming |
| contents | The sudden influx of "TikTok refugees'' into the Chinese platform RedNote in early 2025 created an unprecedented, large-scale online cross-cultural communication event between the West and East. Although prior HCI research has studied user behavior in social media, most work remains confined to monolingual or single-cultural contexts, leaving cross-linguistic and cultural dynamics underexplored. To address this gap, we focused on a particularly challenging cross-cultural encoding-decoding task that remains stubbornly beyond the reach of machine translation, i.e., foreign newcomers asking Chinese users for Chinese names, and examined how people collectively constructed a digital "Babel Tower'' through various information encoding strategies. We collected and analyzed over 70,000 comments from RedNote with a creative human-in-the-loop approach using large language models, deriving a systematic framework summarizing cross-cultural information encoding strategies, how they are combined and layered to complicate decoding, and how they relate to engagement metrics such as the number of likes. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18549 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Tower of Babel in Cross-Cultural Communication: A Case Study of #Give Me a Chinese Name# Dialogues During the "TikTok Refugees'' Event Feng, Jielin Yang, Zhibo Zhao, Jingyi Li, Yujia Ye, Xinwu Lan, Xingyu Chen, Siming Human-Computer Interaction J.4 The sudden influx of "TikTok refugees'' into the Chinese platform RedNote in early 2025 created an unprecedented, large-scale online cross-cultural communication event between the West and East. Although prior HCI research has studied user behavior in social media, most work remains confined to monolingual or single-cultural contexts, leaving cross-linguistic and cultural dynamics underexplored. To address this gap, we focused on a particularly challenging cross-cultural encoding-decoding task that remains stubbornly beyond the reach of machine translation, i.e., foreign newcomers asking Chinese users for Chinese names, and examined how people collectively constructed a digital "Babel Tower'' through various information encoding strategies. We collected and analyzed over 70,000 comments from RedNote with a creative human-in-the-loop approach using large language models, deriving a systematic framework summarizing cross-cultural information encoding strategies, how they are combined and layered to complicate decoding, and how they relate to engagement metrics such as the number of likes. |
| title | Tower of Babel in Cross-Cultural Communication: A Case Study of #Give Me a Chinese Name# Dialogues During the "TikTok Refugees'' Event |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction J.4 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18549 |