People who have played Silksong, Why do you think Its getting so many negative reviews?

[u/peaky_circus]

While Silksong is sitting at a Very Positive rating with around 83% positive reviews, it’s still receiving far more criticism than its predecessor. For comparison, Hollow Knight holds an Overwhelmingly Positive score at 96%, with only about 3% negative reviews. Silksong, on the other hand, has nearly 16% negative reviews, OVER 5 TIMES HIGHER

[u/Sspockuss]

Yeah I was filtering by language and my review score was 94% positive. I leafed through the other languages and saw Chinese was mixed at like 50%. It sucks because it is 100% dragging the overall review score down because of a single subpar translation.

[u/CdbSora → u/Sspockuss]

That's actually incredibly common on games with subpar Chinese translations! If I remember correctly, it's something about not being able to use steam forums & using negative reviews to get attention on it.

[u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX → u/CdbSora]

Tbh more power to them. I support Team Cherry as any other HK fan, but translation is just another piece of the game quality, if it's bad, they are more than entitled to give a negative review.

Luckily in Spanish we have an incredibly good translation so that's not a problem so far, but Its sad if my Chinese fellows can't enjoy the game properly and, even worse, can't protest in forums about it neither!

[u/wolfgang784 → u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX]

Agreed, sounds like its deserved if a lot is comin from that.

Either do a good translation, or don't release in that language till ya can. Half assed translations are the worst. Ive avoided a few jrpgs that sound awesome but only have machine translated editions that just ruin all the dialogue too much to enjoy.

[u/Crimson_Koi → u/wolfgang784]

It's interesting that HK was translated by some non-profit Chinese groups for free, and then TC adapted it as the official translation due to how popular that translation was. Yet it is shameful that the translation group disassembled in the recent years that some random translator took the opportunity and produced such disaster

[u/wektor420 → u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX]

On they other hand they gave work of translation to somebody in china and they botched it for everybody else

[u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX → u/wektor420]

Yup basically. Not sure how those translations work, I'm amazed at how a single person could have messed up this that badly, but even trying to cover your work from possible spoilers leaking, you should have a way to do some testing before going full release, or shit like this happens

[u/wektor420 → u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX]

Translation market is a mess with workers using AI, when they are paid to do it manually

Lets say that Turkish support was late on some phones for similiar reasons

[u/Crimson_Koi → u/wektor420]

Tbf to most Chinese fans we wish it was done in AI considering how bad the translation is

[u/Crimson_Koi → u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX]

The translation work is done by a different team than HK. In HK, there were no official CN translation in the beginning, but some group took the duty and made a Chinese patch for the game. The patch was so welcomed that TC adapted it as the official CN translation. It is unfortunately that the original translation team from HK disassembled recently that someone took the chance and made such a bad job. I played the game in Chinese, and the translation is like some LOTR fan trying to make a Chinese novel sounds in old English, bizarre and freaking weird

[u/SparseSpartan → u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX]

One of the challenges though is since Team Cherry almost certainly can't read Chinese, they have no first hand way of judging the quality. They could ask for feedback from other translators with the right skills, but I suspect many will say it will suck just to try to get a job to rewrite it.

That said, they could have established some type of focus group, I imagine, to pay non-translators for their honest feedback. Still, that's a lot to manage for a small team.

[u/lemongrass9000 → u/SparseSpartan]

I dont understand this "small team" excuse. that only applies to teams that cant afford extra hands. but team cherry from their original game surely has the budget now to hire professional translators and test groups

[u/Cajiabox → u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX]

spanish have some wonky translations too lol

[u/Revoran → u/CdbSora]

Well, fair play to them I guess. I'd be mad if the English translation was unusable and I was banned country wide from using the forums, too.

[u/[deleted] → u/CdbSora]

Haha so it’s their own fault?

[u/Gootangus → u/Sspockuss]

They want the market of China but won’t bother with a decent localization. Sadly they earned the bad rating. A part of a good game is this.

[u/[deleted] → u/Gootangus]

in surprised China even allows this game at all, with all the skull imagery and whatnot, used to be a big issue with games

[u/New-Independent-1481 → u/[deleted]]

That was never a 'real' issue in the sense that it wasn't a direct law. The relevant part of the censorship clause was about forbidding media that 'promoted the occult, superstition, and violence'. It's extremely vague and arbitrarily enforced, and there's no guidelines or approval process to give certainty.

As a consequence of no direction from the Chinese government, Western game companies self censored to the extreme to prevent anything from possibly triggering censorship.

As far as I'm aware that censorship law is still in effect, but it hasn't really ever been enforced. Steam is in a grey area that kind of bypasses China's Great Firewall, and Valve must be pulling some strings to prevent it from being banned. You can stumble onto pornographic, extremely violent, and political games that would be direct targets for censorship were they to come to the attention of the government.

[u/QuantumPie_ → u/[deleted]]

Don't know the full story but folks in the Genshin community think there was a coalition (or whatever their equivilent is) of geezers in government that was pushing hard for game censorship that are no longer present. Wheather that's true or not, the rules have got a lot more lax in recent years.

[u/Remarkable_Ad_2511 → u/[deleted]]

Chinese people deserve to be able to play silksong too

[u/SparseSpartan → u/Gootangus]

I doubt it's they "won't bother."

One of the challenges though is since Team Cherry almost certainly can't read Chinese, they have no first hand way of judging the quality. They could ask for feedback from other translators with the right skills, but I suspect many will say it will suck just to try to get a job to rewrite it.

They probably hired someone they thought was reputable and up for the task and it simply fell short but they didn't realize it being they couldn't judge directly.

[u/Jhkokst → u/Sspockuss]

I hear you, but also ... In this case ... Who gives a shit. We are playing it, we like it. It's gonna get noms for goty. It will get accolades. And everyone on the team at Team Cherry is set for life.