A Monday Discovery
While skimming a Simplified Chinese post, I noticed an odd line. Where 「软件」 should have been, there sat 「軟體」. A word that feels natural to Traditional readers had landed untouched on a Simplified screen. Our writing bot on the Mac mini drafts the Traditional version first and converts the Simplified one from it, so the vocabulary simply stayed behind.
Counting It Up
I went through the last four weeks of posts by hand. Terminology mismatches between the two scripts averaged 7 per week. Typical pairs were 「影片」 and 「视频」, 「資料」 and 「数据」, 「程式」 and 「程序」. Each one is tiny, but to a reader in mainland China it signals 「this is a translation」.
What I Did
Nothing grand. I built a 12-pair glossary and pasted it under the prompt.
軟體 = 软件
影片 = 视频
資料 = 数据
程式 = 程序
滑鼠 = 鼠标
Then I added one more line: 「Do not convert the Simplified version from the Traditional one. Write it from scratch using the table above.」
The Result
Over the next four weeks, mismatches averaged 1 per week. The remaining one was a word missing from the table, and adding a single row fixed it. Review time per post also dropped from about 10 minutes to 3.
Takeaways
• Without a table, the bot copies the nearest text it can find.
• The longer the table, the less it gets read, so 12 lines was a good size.
• When a wrong word appears, update the table before fixing the post.
A small table beat ten rounds of human eyeballing. That was this month's lesson.