Tower of Babel in Cross-Cultural Communication: A Case Study of #Give Me a Chinese Name# Dialogues During the "TikTok Refugees'' Event

TL;DR

This study examines how cross-cultural communication unfolds during a large-scale online event involving Western newcomers and Chinese users on TikTok, focusing on encoding strategies that challenge machine translation.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic framework for understanding cross-cultural encoding-decoding strategies in social media interactions, especially in complex language tasks.

Findings

Identification of diverse encoding strategies used in cross-cultural chats

Analysis of how encoding complexity affects user engagement

Development of a framework linking encoding strategies to interaction outcomes

Abstract

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.