Same Meaning, Different Word
The day after we posted a Traditional Chinese card news set, a Taiwanese reader left a short comment: 「This phrasing sounds like mainland usage.」 The cause was not the translation but the vocabulary. Software is 「軟體」 in Taiwan and 「软件」 in China. Video is 「影片」 versus 「视频」, and data is 「資料」 versus 「数据」.
A Small Experiment
The Dream Team translation bot had always worked sentence by sentence, so even within a single article its word choices drifted. When we counted fix requests caused by vocabulary in Traditional Chinese drafts over the previous four weeks, the average was 9 per week.
This time we changed just one thing. We put 12 frequently used terms into a single table and made the translation bot read it before starting any job.
한국어 | 繁體 | 简体 | English
영상 | 影片 | 视频 | video
데이터 | 資料 | 数据 | data
소프트웨어 | 軟體 | 软件 | software
Result
Over three weeks, vocabulary fix requests fell from 9 a week to 3. The remaining 3 were words missing from the table, and each time we added one line. The glossary grew from 12 terms to 19.
Takeaways
• Many translation quality problems come from word choice, not sentence structure.
• Simplified Chinese is not Traditional Chinese with the characters swapped. The everyday vocabulary itself differs.
• The shorter the table, the better the bot follows it. Once it grows long, the bot starts slipping again.
Getting good translations did not mean explaining sentences better. It meant deciding the confusing words first.