Artificial intelligence-enhanced audiovisual translation for global dissemination of Chinese film and television

This study investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies intersect with audiovisual translation (AVT) to support the global dissemination of Chinese television dramas. Focusing on the Viki streaming platform, which relies on fan-based community subtitling, the research adopts a qualitative case study design to assess whether AI-assisted translations effectively meet the cultural and emotional expectations of international viewers. Data were collected from four popular Chinese dramas and analyzed through multimodal discourse analysis and user-generated commentaries. The findings reveal that while AI technologies enhance translation speed and accessibility, they often struggle with preserving narrative coherence, cultural nuance, and emotional resonance—especially in the absence of human intervention. Human translators play a crucial role in restoring idiomatic meaning, symbolic references, and character identity, thereby improving audience immersion. The study highlights the importance of human–AI collaboration in subtitling workflows and proposes a hybrid model that integrates automated processing with targeted human refinement. These insights contribute to ongoing debates in AVT and offer practical implications for enhancing intercultural understanding through more culturally sensitive media translation practices.