A Comment That Said It Felt Off
One of our Instagram accounts serves Traditional Chinese readers. Last week we posted a new greeting card post, and a follower based in Taiwan commented that the phrase sounded like something used on the mainland. The grammar was fine. It just did not feel natural.
Digging into it, the problem traced back to our translation process. We draft with Claude Code, then run a second pass through another AI model for polish. That second model had quietly slipped in a Simplified Chinese tone. From the bot's perspective it was just making the sentence smoother, but in practice it shifted the regional feel entirely.
The Cross-Check Rule
From that day we set a simple rule. As soon as a Traditional Chinese translation comes out, we immediately generate the same sentence in Simplified Chinese and place them side by side. Wherever the vocabulary overlaps, we flag it for a closer look. For words like video, which differ by region, we built a short lookup table and now include it directly in the prompt.
Reference this regional vocabulary table when translating:
Traditional (Taiwan): 影片 / Simplified (Mainland): 视频
Traditional (Taiwan): 軟體 / Simplified (Mainland): 软件
This is something even a non-developer can maintain. Every time a new word shows up, we just add one more line to the table. It is nothing elaborate, just a notepad-level list, but since that day the same complaint has not come back.
One small slip became one lasting rule. That is a pattern that keeps repeating in how our team operates.