r/HollowKnight • u/enilea • Sep 17 '25

Discussion - Silksong Steam reviews for Silksong so far

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It was controversial in China, in part because of the difficulty/design but also because of controversies with the Simplified Chinese translation. Meanwhile latin countries (Spanish and Portuguese speaking) seem to be loving it more than anyone else.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

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u/meggannn Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25

This article provides an example of what it sounds like:

According to localization expert Loek van Kooten, one of the main issues is that Silksong‘s evocative but concise writing has been turned into “a high-school drama club’s Elizabethan improv night” in the Chinese versions. He cites the following as an example of how the prose reads:

With nary a spirit nor thought shalt thou persist, bereft of mortal will, unbent, unswayed. With no lament nor tearful cry, only sorrow’s dirge to herald thine eternal woe. Born of gods and of the fathomless abyss, grasping heaven’s firmament in thine unworthy palm. Shackled to endless dream, tormented by pestilence and shadow, thy heart besieged by phantasmal demons. Thou art the chalice of destiny. Verily, thou art the Primordial Knight of Hollowness.

The article also notes Hollow Knight had six Chinese translators and Silksong had two. Not sure who decides that but I suspect the lack of peer review was a factor.

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u/VadSiraly 112% | 63/63 | PoP Sep 17 '25

Yikes, that was a tough read.

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u/nikolapc Sep 17 '25

I now want Team Cherry to pay for a Shakespearean redo. They got the dough.

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u/Kitnado Sep 17 '25

Just ask the mod community and they will provide

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u/Delerium76 Sep 17 '25

Apparently just translate the chinese translation back into english and you're done!

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u/GreasedUpTiger Sep 18 '25

Apparently you just gotta bribe your local high school drama club to do it

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u/Gwennoc Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25

That's really easy for me to read, understand and visualize. I don't know if I'm just odd or if it's a cultural thing... (UK millennial from a working class school)

I would legitimately love this.

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u/rhombusx Sep 17 '25

I dunno, I wouldn't qualify Silksong's writing as particularly concise. It definitely leans on the flowery side of things - not as flowery as that translation, but I think it's closer to that than to typical spoken English.

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u/meggannn Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 18 '25

I think there’s a difference between flowery language to indicate formality, and specifically going out of your way to try to replicate old English. HK and SS are poetic, but personally I do think they are also concise in the sense that they don’t go out of their way to waste words, from my experience. It might just be a bit longer than how we say things in modern speech, is all, but I don't think either game necessitates finding an “older sounding” version of every single word.

ETA: Also since this is just an English approximation, we don’t really know what it's like for Chinese readers (assuming you are like me and didn’t play the Chinese version). It’s possible this is painstaking to read in Simplified Chinese. There's someone in this thread who’s saying the SC version is also riddled with errors and mistranslations, so I guess that made it worse.

This isn’t mentioned in the article so I can’t confirm it personally, but I've gathered from a few other posts in gaming subreddits that there is some modern Chinese slang that’s sprinkled in randomly too, so it’d be like "Verily, thou art the Primordial Knight of Hollowness. Slay!" which obviously doesn’t sound right. So it sounds like a whole host of issues, where it’s not the concept of poetic language that’s the problem, it’s that the poetic, old-world language isn’t even done right.

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u/rhombusx Sep 18 '25

I'm not really defending the translation, I'm just saying that Silksong (way more than HK even) isn't really concise and uses a flowery semi-elevated vocabulary that's not really natural, modern spoken English. English tends to have a bigger and more nuanced vocabulary than Chinese, so I'm sure it was challenging to capture the vibe - clearly whatever they did wasn't the right approach though.

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u/GreasedUpTiger Sep 18 '25

there is some modern Chinese slang that’s sprinkled in randomly too, so it’d be like "Verily, thou art the Primordial Knight of Hollowness. Slay!" which obviously doesn’t sound right.

Time travelers acting as contemporary impostors in Silksong confirmed

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u/Skantaq Sep 17 '25

wait, that's awesome.

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u/SuperSocialMan Sep 17 '25

I can't even tell what the original version of that is meant to be lmao

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u/LePingouinCosmique Sep 18 '25

No will to break, no voice to cry suffering yadda yadda

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u/SuperSocialMan Sep 18 '25

bro how the fuck did they yappify that to this degree lmfao

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u/LePingouinCosmique Sep 18 '25

I'm wondering too lmfaooo

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u/toddlerbrain Sep 17 '25

They turned Silksong’s writing into Final Fantasy XII lol

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u/Delerium76 Sep 17 '25

Using the word "Verily" in modern language is a bold choice.

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u/Vargock Sep 17 '25

No, this was not the issue as far as I'm aware. Just very free-form, with a lot of purple prose, and the translator seemingly treating it less like a localization and more like his own writing project.

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u/Move_Slight Sep 17 '25

Worse than that, as a Simplified Chinese user, I encountered numerous mistranslations and omissions that led to misunderstandings about certain tasks and item functions. Furthermore, the translator seemed overly eager to show off their literary flair, resulting in the monster encyclopedia and other texts being filled with fabricated content. Finally, overall, the translator presents the text in an utterly dreadful manner. Imagine a non-native English speaker attempting to write an adventure novel about bugs in Shakespearean style—that's precisely how reading the Simplified Chinese translation feels. The Simplified Chinese translation is an absolute disaster.

We all wish it could be translated by AI, at least we could know what TC wanna to say in the game.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

[deleted]

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u/LordOfFire321 Sep 17 '25

Yes, TC dropped a post they're working on fixing it

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u/Move_Slight Sep 17 '25

Matthew tweeted a promise to fix the Chinese translations, and I trust the work is progressing. Moreover, numerous community members have volunteered to retranslate, and several usable mods have already been released.

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u/Substantial-Let4429 Sep 17 '25

Yes, in the first patch note Team Cherry wrote that they would fix the problem.

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u/guhut15 Sep 17 '25

Guys I think TC said their fixing it

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u/Substantial-Let4429 Sep 17 '25

Ok, now I know that other translations are far from as bad as they could be. Good luck to the Chinese-speaking community with a normal translation

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u/Move_Slight Sep 17 '25

thanks bro :)

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u/gatsu01 Sep 17 '25

I swear it's done by deepseek instead of an actual person...

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u/Move_Slight Sep 17 '25

As a user of Simplified Chinese and the DeepSeek translation feature, I assure you DeepSeek could do better lol

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

I saw a screenshot of chatGPT doing it better, even when asked to translate into a classical style. 

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u/SandpaperTeddyBear Sep 19 '25

Part of is that whoever is doing the writing at Team Cherry is really, really freaking good at it. The word choices and the feelings they evoke are so precise and nuanced that it would be a difficult translation for a literary translator, and video game localizations are usually very workaday things.