The Morning One Word Came Out Three Ways
One morning I skimmed our published articles in all four languages and noticed something odd. The Korean word for subscriber appeared as 「訂閱者」 in Traditional Chinese and 「订阅者」 in Simplified Chinese, but in English some articles said subscriber and others said follower. Because each article was translated on its own, the same term drifted in every direction.
The Fix: One Glossary File
I created a glossary.md file in the project folder and told Claude Code to read it before translating.
| 한국어 | 繁體 | 简体 | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| 구독자 | 訂閱者 | 订阅者 | subscriber |
| 저장 | 收藏 | 收藏 | save |
| 카드뉴스 | 圖文卡片 | 图文卡片 | card news |
Three Steps You Can Follow
1. Ask Claude to pull the 10 most frequent terms from your last 5 articles.
2. Put them in a table, and for any ambiguous term, pick one translation yourself and lock it in.
3. Add one line to your instructions: 「Read glossary.md before translating, and use the listed terms exactly as written.」
The Result
When I checked the 12 articles published the following week, cases where the same concept was translated differently dropped from 9 to 1. The remaining one was a new word that was not in the table, and I added a line for it the same day.
Start Small
You do not need to fill in 100 terms on day one. Adding one line each time you spot a mismatch is the approach that lasts. A glossary is not a document you finish, but one you grow as you use it.