A Study on Human-AI Collaborative Approaches for the International Promotion Translation of Yue Opera: A Case Study of “The Butterfly Lovers”

As an important component of China’s intangible cultural heritage, the international dissemination of the representative Yue Opera repertoire “The Butterfly Lovers” imposes high demands on translation quality. The dense interplay of cultural imagery, poetic expression, and musicality in the lyrics poses challenges for purely human translation, such as low efficiency and high costs; meanwhile, general-purpose AI translation systems struggle to independently handle tasks in cultural international promotion that require aesthetic judgment. This paper introduces Vermeer’s teleological approach, establishing the highest principle of international promotion translation as achieving specific communicative purposes, and on this basis, proposes a collaborative pathway that integrates cultural adaptation, AI batch generation, human multidimensional editing, and expert evaluation. Through the English translation of classic excerpts from “The Butterfly Lovers” this study explores how, guided by the principles of purpose, coherence, and faithfulness, to leverage AI’s generative capabilities in tandem with human translators’ cultural and aesthetic judgment, thereby producing translations that are both suitable for stage performance and emotionally resonant. This purpose-oriented human-AI collaboration seeks to establish an actionable balance between communicative effectiveness and artistic authenticity, offering valuable insights for the international promotion translation of traditional Chinese theater.