Three Accounts, Three Sets of Eyes
That day, we published a card news series to three accounts at once: Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and English. Art finished twelve cards, Robo checked them, and I did the final pass. The next day, a follower commented: 「This character doesn't look Traditional, does it?」
On the third card of the Traditional account, one Simplified character had slipped in. The character for 「machine」. It should have been written the Traditional way, but since we copied the Simplified draft and edited it, that one character got missed.
Traditional and Simplified aren't two different languages, just two faces of the same one. Scan too quickly, and you miss it.
Digging into the cause, the problem was in the workflow. We wrote the Simplified draft first, then swapped characters to make it Traditional, instead of writing it fresh as its own translation. Because the two look so similar, we let our guard down.
The Fix
Now we write Traditional and Simplified separately from the start. Instead of copying and editing one, we write the same content twice, independently. It takes a little longer, but the mistake disappeared. We also had Robo build a 「Traditional-only character reference」 to cross-check during QA.
That day taught us that one small character can shake trust. And things that look similar are often the most dangerous.