“A huge percentage of the scripts here are just AI translated from Chinese and then localized. Localizing is a profession in the microdrama biz where it's like you take sort of Chinese idioms translated by the AI and try to make them more American sounding, but often they don't even really bother with that.”
the culture journalist · Media & Creator Economy · October 2026
Context
Asked about the geopolitical angle of Chinese companies producing microdramas in Los Angeles, Kolitz describes Hollywood becoming something like a company town for the format, and how the scripts arrive.
Transcript
…it's also a situation where people are just grateful for work. And so are willing to subject themselves not just to these sorts of semi-degrading working conditions, but to working on these shows that are even more slop-like than sort of whatever bottom-of-the-barrel Hollywood content was before.
…over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. Another thing I find very interesting, kind of riffing off of the offshoring point, is that this story is interesting on a geopolitical level because it's also companies in countries like China kind of offshoring here, right?
…in the opposite direction where, you know, Hollywood studios were designing their films to appeal to Chinese audiences and have global appeal. And, you know, we're famously sort of self-censoring to appeal to Chinese audiences. And we are now seeing that exchange in another direction where this is to its core, a Chinese format. I mean, to the point that, you know, as I mentioned in the article, a huge percentage of the scripts here are just AI translated from Chinese and then localized. Localizing is a profession in the microdrama biz where it's like you take sort of Chinese idioms translated by the AI and try to make them more American sounding, but often they don't even really bother with that. But yeah, all these tropes are born in China. The form itself obviously is born in China. It is a Chinese art form that is taken off in America. And if there is any kind of like charge to these microdramas, it is just the bizarre spectacle of watching this weird collision of sort of American actors. I mean, that's the other thing is that these Chinese companies have a very set and rigid idea of…
I mean, maybe at least we're getting a taste of our own medicine of like what it feels like for another country to sort of like export its culture onto that ubiquitous. Yeah.
Yeah.
Did you get a chance to probably would have been in the piece more if you had, but you covered so much that sort of like whispers of the rumors of like, is this maybe also money laundering? I mean, there is such an insane amount of international money tied up in these. I just feel like from a…
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