LAUSR

This study investigates how privacy as an ethical concept exists in two languages: Mandarin Chinese and American English. The exploration relies on two genres of corpora from 10 years: social media posts and news articles, 2010–2019. A mixed‐methods approach combining structural topic modeling (STM) and human interpretation were used to work with the data. Findings show various privacy‐related topics across the two languages. Moreover, some of these different topics revealed fundamental incompatibilities for understanding privacy across these two languages. In other words, some of the variations of topics do not just reflect contextual differences; they reveal how the two languages value privacy in different ways that can relate back to the society's ethical tradition. This study is one of the first empirically grounded intercultural explorations of the concept of privacy. It has shown that natural language is promising to operationalize intercultural and comparative privacy research, and it provides an examination of the concept as it is understood in these two languages.