Research on Cross-cultural Adaptation and Communication Strategies of Traditional Chinese Cultural Symbols Empowered by Generative AI

Abstract

Traditional Chinese cultural symbols carry profound national aesthetic connotations, philosophical thoughts and historical genes, yet they have long faced bottlenecks including semantic misunderstanding, aesthetic mismatch, narrative rigidity and Western cultural bias in global cross-cultural communication. The rapid iteration of generative AI represented by large language models, diffusion models and multimodal generative networks provides intelligent technical support for the decoding, adaptive reconstruction and personalized global dissemination of cultural symbols. Based on algorithmic iconography theory, cultural dimension theory and cross-cultural communication theory, this study adopts a mixed research method combining questionnaire survey, comparative experiment and case analysis. It collects 480 valid user evaluation samples from Western countries, Southeast Asia and East Asia, constructs quantitative evaluation indicators covering semantic accuracy, aesthetic acceptance, narrative fluency and cultural identity, and analyzes the practical pain points of traditional Chinese cultural symbols in cross-cultural communication and the technical advantages of generative AI in symbolic disassembly, semantic translation and multimodal reconstruction. The research finds that mainstream generative AI models still have defects such as cultural semantic drift, stereotype solidification and regional adaptation deficiency when outputting Chinese traditional cultural symbols. Accordingly, this paper constructs a four-dimensional cross-cultural adaptation communication system driven by generative AI: cultural knowledge graph embedding layer, regional adaptive algorithm optimization layer, human-AI collaborative narrative reconstruction layer and cross-platform scenario dissemination layer. Furthermore, targeted differentiated communication strategies for European and American markets, Southeast Asian cultural circle and Northeast Asian neighboring regions are proposed. This study fills the research gap of quantitative empirical analysis in AI-enabled cultural symbol cross-cultural communication, and provides practical theoretical references and technical paths for the international dissemination of Chinese excellent traditional culture and the construction of national cultural discourse power.