To translate a meeting into Traditional Chinese, you add a translation bot to the call and each Traditional-Chinese reader selects it as their caption language. The catch — and it's a big one — is that a lot of tools treat "Chinese" as a single language and quietly hand Traditional-Chinese readers Simplified text. That reads to a reader in Taipei or Hong Kong the way machine-translated English reads to you: technically parseable, obviously not written for them.
Here's how to get it right, and why the Simplified-vs-Traditional distinction matters more than most tools admit.
Why "just translate it to Chinese" isn't enough
Traditional and Simplified Chinese aren't a font choice. They differ in characters, in vocabulary, in idiom, and even in punctuation conventions. A reader in Taiwan getting Simplified output isn't reading their language with a different skin — they're reading mainland-Mandarin phrasing rendered in characters that signal "this wasn't meant for you."
In a meeting, that signal is expensive. The whole point of real-time captions is that people trust them enough to rely on them mid-conversation. The moment the wording feels foreign, that trust drops, and you're back to the person quietly re-translating in their head.
So "supports Chinese" and "supports Traditional Chinese, written the way a Taiwanese or Hong Kong reader expects" are different claims — and only the second one is useful if that's who's in your meeting.
How to do it with Sageio
- Add
bot@sageio.netto your Google Meet calendar invite. It joins automatically — no extension, no install. - Each participant picks their caption language, and Traditional Chinese is its own selectable language — not an alias for "Chinese" that resolves to Simplified.
- Everyone speaks naturally. Captions appear in about two seconds, so the meeting keeps its pace.
- Afterward, a searchable transcript and an AI summary arrive within about five minutes, shared at the host's discretion.
Sageio treats Traditional Chinese — along with Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Thai — as a first-class language rather than an afterthought bolted onto a European-first pipeline. That's a deliberate architecture choice, not a settings toggle: the failure modes of each script are handled on purpose.
(Today this runs on Google Meet; Zoom and Microsoft Teams support is coming soon.)
A note for mixed Mandarin/Cantonese meetings
If your meeting includes Cantonese speakers, watch for a second, related failure: many tools route Cantonese audio through a Mandarin speech-to-text model, which gets the text wrong on nearly every line because Cantonese has its own grammar and particles. Cantonese needs its own path, and the captions Cantonese speakers read should still land in proper Traditional Chinese. Treat "handles Mandarin" and "handles Cantonese correctly" as separate questions when you evaluate any tool.
Is it private?
For anything that joins your meetings: Sageio doesn't use your meeting content to train AI models, and its AI vendors are contractually restricted from doing the same. Audio is processed in memory and discarded — only the text transcript and summary are kept, encrypted, in the region you choose (US, EU, or APAC). Enterprise customers can self-host the whole stack.
Frequently asked questions
How do I translate a meeting into Traditional Chinese?
Add bot@sageio.net to your Google Meet invite; each Traditional-Chinese reader selects Traditional Chinese as their caption language and reads the conversation translated in real time. Make sure the tool offers Traditional Chinese as a distinct option, not a generic "Chinese" that returns Simplified.
Is Traditional Chinese the same as Simplified Chinese for translation? No. They differ in characters, vocabulary, idiom, and punctuation. Serving Simplified text to a Traditional-Chinese reader reads as foreign and erodes trust in the captions.
How fast are the translated captions? About two seconds, fast enough to keep a live conversation flowing.
What does it cost to try? Every plan starts with a free 60-minute trial, no credit card required. After that, Professional is $49/month and Teams is $99 per seat/month; Enterprise is custom.
If anyone in your meetings reads Traditional Chinese, the quickest test is to run one real call and ask them whether the captions read like their language or like a translation of someone else's. Add the bot to your next meeting and let them judge.