From Distance to Rupture to Bridging: Linguistic–Cultural Risk Mapping and Data-Intelligent Governance Mechanisms in Chinese Enterprises’ Expansion into Latin America

Abstract

In the course of Chinese enterprises accelerating their expansion into Latin American markets, capital and productive capacity have achieved an unprecedented hard landing, yet language and culture are increasingly emerging as an implicit soft barrier. Existing studies mostly focus on institutional environment, political risk and macro-level strategic deployment, while discussions of linguistic and cultural factors tend to remain at a principled level and have not yet formed a systematic framework that can be incorporated into enterprise risk management systems. Adopting a conceptual research design, this study develops an analytical framework and a governance model to address this gap. Building on a review of research on language in international business and on language risk, this article establishes linguistic–cultural risk as an independent risk category and identifies four interrelated risk domains: institutional–compliance, organizational–coordination, market–narrative and data–algorithmic risk. The article introduces the dynamic analytical framework of distance–rupture–bridging and, from the perspectives of linguistic distance, distance in cultural memory and cognitive–narrative distance, constructs a linguistic–cultural risk map for Chinese enterprises entering Latin America. Further, the article conceptualizes generative artificial intelligence and intelligent language services as a new form of infrastructure for data-intelligent language governance, and proposes a closed-loop governance mechanism of identification–assessment–early warning–intervention–review, together with corresponding pathways for organizational embedding at the strategic, functional, project and cooperation levels. It argues that upgrading linguistic and cultural factors from a soft issue to a measurable and manageable, independent risk category not only helps enhance the business resilience of Chinese enterprises operating in Latin America, but also offers new theoretical perspectives and practical directions for the language services industry’s transformation from translation processing to risk-oriented language governance, and for foreign language education’s shift from single language competence cultivation to a tripartite curricular system of language competence + risk literacy + data-intelligent tool literacy.