Beyond Porcelain: Heritage Translation as an Epistemological Filter in Western Museum Metadata

Museum metadata is not a neutral record of cultural heritage but a site of cross-cultural translation where classification systems shape what is visible and what is silenced. This paper examines how Chinese cultural symbols are transformed through English-language metadata of four major museum collections totalling 40,072 artefact records. Constructing a co-occurrence network of 122 Chinese cultural symbols via a two-layer cross-lingual semantic matching pipeline, we measure heritage translation effects at scale. An epistemological filter privileging material over conceptual content is exposed most starkly in the near-total invisibility of ren (仁). The filter, grounded in classification asymmetry, operates through four mechanisms. The Translatability Fallacy—that more comprehensive metadata can close this gap—is challenged: greater semantic coverage reveals, rather than diminishes, the asymmetry.