Translational AI, Digital Multimodality, and Linguistic Authority: A Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of Multilingual News Production on TikTok and X

Abstract

The convergence of artificial intelligence, platformized communication, and multilingual digital media has transformed the production, circulation, and interpretation of contemporary news discourse. This study investigates how AI-assisted multilingual news practices reshape communicative authority, linguistic legitimacy, and ideological framing across TikTok and X as two structurally distinct digital communication environments. Drawing upon critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse theory, and corpus-assisted computational linguistics, the article comparatively analyzes 2.1 million words of multilingual news-related discourse collected from English-, Spanish-, and Japanese-language content between 2023 and 2025. The findings demonstrate that TikTok prioritizes affective multimodality, narrative compression, and algorithmically amplified identity performance, whereas X sustains discursive contestation through textual interactivity, ideological polarization, and translational circulation. AI-assisted captioning, automated translation, and generative summarization significantly influence semantic framing, audience interpretation, and institutional credibility across both platforms. The comparative evidence further reveals that AI-mediated multilingual communication increasingly restructures journalistic authority by privileging platform-compatible discourse forms over traditional editorial verification structures. This article argues that digital multilingual news environments now operate through algorithmically regulated communicative ecologies in which linguistic adaptation, multimodal circulation, and computational visibility jointly shape socio-political interpretation and transnational public discourse. The study contributes to contemporary linguistics scholarship by proposing the concept of platformed translational authority to explain how AI-mediated multilingual communication transforms institutional news legitimacy within global digital publics.