Abstract Playing cute has become a corporate branding strategy, but its integration with translanguaging on social media remains underexplored. This study proposes an analytical framework for playing cute as a pragmatic act on corporate social media and conducts a cross-platform analysis of how a leading Chinese corporation adopts translanguaging resources to play cute strategically. Findings show that the dominance of the strategy orienting towards playing babyishly cute across both Weibo and Twitter underscores its universal appeal, and the preference of playing whimsically and kindly cute on Weibo than on Twitter is attributable to linguistic-cultural proximity in intracultural communication and linguistic-cultural complexity in intercultural communication. Similarly, hashtag and text are employed more significantly on Weibo while emojis are deployed more significantly on Twitter, and mono-resource translanguaging pattern is more used than bi-resource and N -resource patterns. This study enhances understanding of playing cute and sheds light on globalized digital governance of Chinese state-owned corporations.
Gou et al. (Tue,) studied this question.