Foreign Languages and Artificial Intelligence in the International Communication of Intangible Cultural Heritage Tourism: A Review and Framework for Heilongjiang, China

Abstract

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is living traditions, knowledge, skills, practices, and cultural expressions, transmitted from generation to generation, and which are continually recreated by the communities and groups that express them. Nowadays, as cultural tourism and digital technologies develop, ICH is an increasingly important resource for international cultural communication and the creation of new destinations. International communication of ICH tourism faces persistent challenges: language barriers, culturally embedded terminology, a lack of multilingual resources, and the difficulty of adapting a local cultural story for an international audience. At the same time, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly neural machine translation and generative AI, open new possibilities for multilingual cultural communication, content generation, visitor interaction, and tourism services. This paper is a review of the emerging intersection of AI, language services, cultural heritage, and tourism communication in Heilongjiang, China. Based on the recent literature and on the international poli-cy discussions on the issue of digital cultural heritage (DCH), the paper defines and discusses four major research trends: the digitalization of heritage resources, the use of AI to assist the cultural interpretation of heritage, multilingual communication related to heritage, and human-AI collaboration in tourism services. The review also claims that AI can improve the efficiency and access of ICH communication, but linguistic fluency alone is not enough to be culturally and interculturally effective. Human expertise is needed for cultural interpretation, terminology management, ethical governance, and quality. In this review, we propose a Human-AI Augmented International Language Service (HAILS) framework for ICH tourism in Heilongjiang. The framework combines heritage digitization, AI-empowered language processing, intercultural adaptation, multilingual dissemination, and human quality assurance into a closed-loop service system. The paper suggests that the internationalization of ICH tourism should move from conventional translation to integrated cultural mediation and intelligent language services. This paper’s framework can serve as a theoretical basis for empirical studies and practice in Heilongjiang and other regions with abundant cultural heritage resources.