zhtw-mcp

A linguistic linter for Traditional Chinese (zh-TW) that enforces Taiwan Ministry of Education (MoE) standards on vocabulary, punctuation, and character shapes. It plugs into AI coding assistants through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and catches Mainland Chinese (zh-CN) regional drift before it reaches the user.

The tool enforces three official Taiwan standards:

• Revised Handbook of Punctuation (《重訂標點符號手冊》修訂版) -- punctuation marks
• Standard Form of National Characters (《國字標準字體》) -- character shapes
• Cross-strait vocabulary normalization, grounded in OpenCC's TWPhrases/TWVariants datasets -- word choices

Over 1000 vocabulary rules and 15 casing rules are compiled into the binary. For ambiguous terms, the server asks the AI assistant it runs inside for help deciding -- no extra API keys required.

Why this exists

Modern Chinese is an inadequately standardized language

In the late Qing dynasty, scholars had to express Western concepts in a writing system with no native vocabulary for them. Whether coining new words or importing translations via Japanese (和製漢語), they assembled a literary system under enormous time pressure. Many translated terms were inconsistent, ambiguous, or contradictory. The Chinese-speaking world has lived with these deficiencies for over a century.

Simplified Chinese made it worse

The PRC simplification effort reduced not just stroke counts but vocabulary precision. Terms that should vary by domain got flattened into single catch-all translations. Many PRC translations were coined hastily: if a term worked in one context, it spread uncritically to others.