Same Chinese Characters, Different Words: What Traditional and Simplified Chinese Taught Us
Last week the dream team ran a small experiment. When making captions for Instagram card news in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, we used to write the Traditional version first and run it through an automatic converter to get Simplified. It looked fine on the surface, but when Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese readers each reviewed their version, five out of ten Simplified captions came back with the same feedback: it sounds off.
The reason turned out to be simple. Simplified Chinese is not just a change in character shape, the vocabulary itself is different. For example, what Taiwan writes as 「軟體」, the Mainland writes as 「软件」. A tool that only converts character shapes cannot catch that kind of difference.
So we added one line to the CLAUDE.md file that Claude Code reads.
For cn (Simplified), do not just convert characters from zh (Traditional).
Rewrite using vocabulary that Mainland Chinese readers actually use.
After adding that single instruction, we regenerated the same ten captions. The off feedback dropped from five to one. Even that remaining one turned out to be a regional slang difference that humans found ambiguous too.
The part anyone without a coding background can copy is simple. Create a CLAUDE.md file at the root of your project and write down, in plain sentences, how you want something done. From then on, Claude Code remembers that rule every single time. No complex settings, no code. Just writing down the result you want in plain words, that was the whole trick.