Why does AI write 視頻 instead of 影片 in Traditional Chinese?

Your draft is in correct Traditional Chinese and it still reads as though it were written for somewhere else. That is a vocabulary problem, not a character problem, and it takes about thirty seconds to find.

Do the two searches below, paste one standing instruction into the tool, then search again on the next draft. All of it is free, and it works in whichever tool you already use.

Step 1: search these eight mainland words

Paste the draft anywhere with a search box — Word, Google Docs, a browser tab — and press Ctrl+F or Cmd+F. Search the left-hand column one word at a time. A hit is a rewrite, not a discussion.

Step 2: search the Taiwan words as well

This is the step nobody tells you about. Plenty of tools were "fixed" for Traditional Chinese by aiming at Taipei, and to a Hong Kong reader that is still a foreign accent.

Step 3: paste one standing instruction into the tool

Fix the tool, not the draft. Both of the tools most people use keep a place for instructions that apply to every chat.

• Gemini: Settings and help, then Personal Intelligence, then Instructions for Gemini, then Add. Google describes these as the instructions you want applied to every chat.
• ChatGPT: Settings, then Customize ChatGPT.

Paste this in, in Chinese. Handing the model the actual words works better than describing them:

請用香港書面繁體中文。用「你」，不要用「您」。香港用詞：影片、資訊、品質、網絡、軟件、屏幕、打印機、的士。不要用大陸用詞「視頻、質量、信息、內存」，也不要用台灣用詞「軟體、網路、螢幕、印表機」。

If you write for clients rather than for yourself, keep that line in a note and paste it at the top of every brief, so it travels with the work.

Step 4: search the next draft again

A standing instruction does not always reach the model. Run step 1 on the next thing the tool writes for you. If the same word comes back, stop relying on the setting: put the word list in the prompt itself, every time.

Why it happens: the tool converted characters, not words

Turning mainland Chinese into Hong Kong Chinese is two jobs, and most tools do only the first.

The first job is character conversion. 视频 becomes 視頻 — a correct one-to-one mapping, and a tool that stops there reports success.

The second job is vocabulary conversion, and Hong Kong does not use the word 視頻 at all. Hong Kong writes 影片. Taiwan writes 視訊. Three places, three words, and no amount of character mapping produces any of them.

OpenCC, the open-source conversion library sitting inside a great many writing tools and online converters, ships the two jobs as separately named settings. s2t is "Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese (OpenCC Standard)". s2twp is "Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese (Taiwan Standard, with Taiwan Phrases)". That word Phrases is the entire second job, and it is opt-in.

Then there is the reason the second job so often lands in Taipei. In Unicode CLDR, the locale database most software resolves language through, the file for Traditional Chinese in Taiwan is 483 bytes and holds no data at all, because CLDR's own likely-subtags rule maps zh_Hant straight to zh_Hant_TW. The Hong Kong file is 618,065 bytes of overrides. Ask a machine for "Traditional Chinese" and the standard hands back Taiwan. You get Hong Kong only by naming Hong Kong, and a chat box is not where most people think to do that.

The word lists you find online are Taiwanese

Search for a Simplified-leakage checklist and you will get a Taiwanese one, because Taiwan publishes far more Traditional Chinese style guidance than Hong Kong does. Those lists will tell you 軟件 is a mainland word to be corrected to 軟體. In Hong Kong that correction is wrong, and one official document settles it: the Digital Policy Office's English-Chinese Glossary of IT Terms (《英漢資訊科技辭彙》), the Government's own translation standard for IT work.

The single 視頻 in that glossary sits inside a borrowed format name, Audio Video Interleave (AVI) 音頻視頻交織格式, and not in any Hong Kong term.

Read the pattern rather than the rows. Hong Kong writes 軟件 and 打印機, agreeing with the mainland and disagreeing with Taiwan. Hong Kong also writes 記憶體 and 滑鼠, agreeing with Taiwan and disagreeing with the mainland. Hong Kong is a third register, not a midpoint between two others, so no single "convert to Traditional" switch can be right.

OpenCC's own data files say it out loud. TWPhrases.txt, its Taiwan vocabulary dictionary, runs to 825 lines and rewrites 軟件 to 軟體, 網絡 to 網路, 信息 to 資訊, 內存 to 記憶體 and 打印機 to 印表機. HKPhrases.txt, the Hong Kong one, runs to 89 lines and rewrites none of those. What it does rewrite is 鼠標 to 滑鼠, 硬盤 to 硬碟, 搜索 to 搜尋 and 隱私權 to 私隱權. Nine times as much work has gone into the Taiwan list, and the Hong Kong phrase configuration s2hkp is still marked as in development. Whatever checklist you find online is drawing on the 825-line file.

We ran the same counts over seven Hong Kong government and industry sites and got the same answer: 資訊 204 against 信息 5, 網絡 244 against 網路 50, 軟件 22 against 軟體 3, and 影片 8 against zero occurrences each of 視頻 and 質量.

Two words that are not mistakes: 軟件 and 品質

軟件 is correct Hong Kong usage. The Government glossary uses it 48 times and 軟體 not once. If a checklist tells you to change it, the checklist is Taiwanese.

Quality is the one place Hong Kong splits two ways itself. Across those seven sites 質素 appeared 4 times, and on the Consumer Council's own site 品質 appeared 5 times against 質素 2 and 質量 0. Both are Hong Kong; 品質 is the commoner of the two, and it is the one we write. 質量 is the word that is not Hong Kong at all, and it is the one to search for.

What we would skip

We would skip auto-replacing on a blocklist. We ship one ourselves: every Chinese sentence a model writes for a WITTI Grow audit report passes a nine-rule repair before a customer sees it, and until we counted, one of those rules rewrote 軟件 into 軟體 — inherited unexamined from exactly the Taiwanese checklists above. The Government glossary uses 軟件 48 times and 軟體 never, so on Hong Kong copy that rule was correcting correct writing. Counting is what found it, and we reversed the rule. Use a word list to find, and leave the decision to a person. That limitation belongs to every tool in this category, ours included; a search you run yourself does not have it.

We would skip buying a second tool to clean up the first one's Chinese. Every step above is one setting or one search. Paying more does not buy a Hong Kong register setting either: ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro are both US$20 a month billed in US dollars, which lands on a Hong Kong card at roughly HK$155 to HK$157 under the linked exchange rate and drifts on your statement without notice, and Microsoft 365 Premium is priced in Hong Kong dollars at HK$158.00 a month. We could not find a Hong Kong Chinese setting on any of them, at any tier.

We would skip the argument about whether Hong Kong customers can read Simplified Chinese. They can. Reading is not the issue, the signal is. Hong Kong writes 私隱權 rather than 隱私權, and 打印機 rather than Taiwan's 印表機. Both halves of each pair are perfectly readable here, and only one of each tells a customer that the business is local. Around 360,000 SMEs compete in Hong Kong, over 98% of all business establishments, and almost every one of them competes on being local. Sounding imported is not a cosmetic problem.

Run the free audit on your own site

WITTI Grow's free website audit runs ten SEO checks and eight conversion checks on any website and returns the report in English and 繁體中文, with no signup. Run it, then take the searches above to whichever pages it flags. Start at wittigrow.com.

Next guide: The AI tool stack for a three-person Hong Kong clinic, priced in HKD