Designing the Meaning Infrastructure: Governing Interpretation in AI-Driven Institutions

Tagline: Governance as the structured maintenance of translation interfaces. Paper Description: This paper develops the design implications of Translation Drift.In AI-mediated environments, evaluative assumptions become embedded in artefacts — dashboards, scoring models, templates, and optimisation systems. Drift relocates into infrastructure.The paper defines Interpretive Maintenance as the governance capability required to monitor and recalibrate translation nodes while preserving distributed agency.It reframes governance as structural maintenance rather than oversight. Programme description: This paper is part of the Coherence Programme, a research series examining how institutional decision systems maintain—or lose—fidelity to declared intent under conditions of complexity, scale, and delayed feedback. The programme models institutional governance as an Operating Spine linking Purpose, Capabilities, Value Drivers, Strategy, Portfolio, and Signals. Across this spine, intent is translated through discrete interfaces where cumulative divergence (Translation Drift), measurable alignment (Translation Coherence), and governance intervention (Interpretive Maintenance) can be structurally analysed. Supporting materials, working documents, and programme structure are available via the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/9cvky/ Version 2.00: This is the first public release of this manuscript within the research programme structure. The paper presents the design-oriented analysis linking translation drift to meaning infrastructure and governance implications. Cross-paper terminology has been harmonised, the unit-of-analysis statement has been standardised across the series, and reference architecture has been aligned. The positioning of AI as interpretive traceability support is consistent with the architectural and methodological papers. No empirical datasets are associated with this version. Version 2.01: consolidates the manuscript within the full research programme structure. Cross-paper terminology has been harmonised, titles and references have been aligned with the programme statement, and internal cross-references have been updated. No changes have been made to the formal decision-learning architecture, measurement logic, boundary conditions, or theoretical claims. Empirical studies, measurement instruments, and field applications are in preparation and will be released in subsequent linked records. Version 2.02: Programme Consolidation Update: This version consolidates the manuscript within the unified Coherence Programme structure.Titles, terminology, and internal cross-references have been harmonised across the series to stabilise the programme’s core constructs: Translation Drift (mechanism) Translation Coherence (metric) Interpretive Maintenance (governance function) Distributed Coherence (theoretical integration) No changes have been made to the formal architecture, boundary conditions, methodological logic, or theoretical claims.The update improves cross-paper traceability, indexing consistency, and conceptual coherence across the programme.