Same Word, Different Characters
If you hand a bot Traditional and Simplified Chinese in one go, it usually produces convincing translations. The trouble is that terms drift inside a single article. It is normal for 「software」 to appear as 軟體 in the Traditional version and 软件 in the Simplified one. But if one Traditional article uses 軟體 in the first paragraph and 軟件 in the last, readers notice right away.
A Small Experiment
I pasted a glossary at the very top of the translation request. It was a tiny table holding just ten frequently used terms.
Term (KO) | Traditional | Simplified | English
소프트웨어 | 軟體 | 软件 | software
메모리 | 記憶體 | 内存 | memory
서버 | 伺服器 | 服务器 | server
Below the table I added one line: 「Translate words not in the table naturally, but keep one consistent expression within the same article.」
Steps You Can Follow
1. Pick the ten terms that show up most often in your past articles.
2. Write the Traditional, Simplified, and English versions side by side and save them as one note file.
3. Paste that table at the top of every translation request.
4. When the result comes back, search for the table terms and confirm none of them appear in a different form elsewhere.
5. If a new term starts to wobble, add one more row to the table.
The Result
After adding the glossary, the lines we fixed for terminology during review nearly vanished. The table also remembered the vocabulary gap between Traditional and Simplified for us, so the Simplified version stopped reading like the Traditional one with swapped characters. A glossary works best not when it is long, but when it holds only the words that tend to wobble.
In one line: before asking a bot to 「keep it consistent,」 write down what consistent means and hand it over.