Reshelled Translation: Legal and Intercultural Predicaments in the Global Circulation of Chinese Short Dramas and the Transformative Potential of Digital Humanities

Abstract

This paper studies the dual predicaments facing the global dissemination of Chinese short dramas through the concept of “Reshelled Translation”. It believes that “Reshelled Translation” is not simply a type of linguistic transmission, but a multi-level process where Chinese short dramas are repackaged as locally original products by substituting language, performers, settings and cultural markers. The above two results are: an explicit legal problem of copyright protection and an implicit intercultural problem of cultural erosion. Given the above problems, the paper puts forward a data-driven framework for proactive construction based on digital humanities. The three links in the framework are: first, use LDA topic modelling and sentiment analysis to discover cross-cultural value consensus; second, construct a knowledge-graph-based agent-based evaluation system for cultural embeddedness assessment; and finally, build an executable translation strategy through a multi-agent collaborative translation and detection system. Together, these stages have turned the diffuse intercultural risks into quantifiable data, identified culturally rich works that are worth proactively translating, and produced translated editions that balance value adaptation with cultural inheritance. Therefore, the article puts forward “Reshelled Translation” as a new way of cross-border cultural mediation and proposes a proactive strategy for the international dissemination of Chinese short dramas.