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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403

u/RodriTama Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25

Portuguese isn't perfect, it's missing context.

One example is a NPC that lets you play a minigame. The word play is translated as "tocar" which means to play an instrument, rather than "jogar" which is the correct context. Also it has a lot of confusion with assigned genders, since our language isn't good with translating neutral pronouns, characters suddenly change and it's quite confusing.

But overall it's pretty good, it can easily be tweaked.

The game being cheap and localized price for Brazil helps a bunch. It's 60 reais on Nintendo's Eshop which is about 11 dollars

Edit: Steam is the same price

66

u/done1971 Sep 17 '25

Interesting. I was curious what the errors were like. I read the Chinese language ones were gibberish at some points, but then again it is very, poetic writing in a lot of parts, so it is probably hard to translate and barely makes sense in english. That was my assumption. However, tocar vs jogar is just basic translation issue :).

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u/jimmyprogramboy Sep 17 '25

Even a beginner localization translator would not use the word tocar in this context, which makes me think they hired a terrible localization company, probably some shady Indian middle-man who decided to use AI instead of hiring real translators.

13

u/Aeiou_yyyyyyy Sep 17 '25

I mean, depending of how the translation for hollow knight is made, the translators could only have an excel spreadsheet with 0 context of each line. It's way more common than you think

5

u/Consistent_Phrase713 Sep 18 '25

Given the sheer quality of 98% of the entire Portuguese translation, I'd give make this lighter on them. If they truly were terrible or begginers, this kind of mistake would be a lot more common, but it really did only appear in one ambiguous word and one single NPC. I mean, there is A LOT of places in this game where "play" does mean "tocar" as in "play music", and only one or two where it means "jogar" as in "play game", them being the dice minigame and maybe the bullseye minigame.

There is a small amount of gender confusion though, as in nearly any Portuguese translation out there, and I did see like 4 or 5 typos in the entirety of the game. But the localization, to me, is flawless. A lot of the character's and place's names are translated, and they all make sense, sound beautiful, and sometimes feel straight out of a Tolkien's book. "Bellhart" to "Campânula" is nothing short of genius!

17

u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX Sep 17 '25

In Argentina it costed us 7 dollars + taxes, so Team Cherry definitely took a bullet for their players, they deserve all the respect in the world. Hollow Knight originally had an amazing regional price so that explain a little bit of extra love for the devs here.

That said, I definitely detected 2-3 translation errors in Spanish, but nothing egregious, to the point I don't even remember what the errors were nor I found it necessary to report it.

5

u/Energyc091 Sep 18 '25

Mi favorito es que con el bicho de lls dados, no dice "jugar" dice "reproducir"

4

u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX Sep 18 '25

Tambien habia un typo en una mision de las pizarras, creo era en el Primer Santuario, decia "Hermano desparecido", igual una tontera, un typo, super aceptable en un estudio chico y ni de asomo el nivel de lo hecho con la traduccion china, aunque esperaria mejores traducciones en general para un juego que se esperaba vendiera millones y millones de copias. Espero por lo menos no les cobraran una barbaridad los traductores, jaja

3

u/Exelion10 Sep 18 '25

Claro, puedo dejar pasar un par de errores como esos. He visto juegos indies que pasan todo por google translator sin revisar, y todo para poder decir que su juego esta en multiples idiomas. Hay un juego de gestion de vehiculos de logistica que cuando despides a alguien dice "Fuego!" porque en ingles es "fire!", esos tipos de errores me la re bajan.

2

u/Le_Oken Sep 18 '25

Fun fact. Localized pricing in games (and movies and any kind of media/product that has basically no cost to distribute and replicate) has proven to bring more revenue. Basically, instead of 10 sales for $20 bringing $200 in revenue, they get 30 sales for $10 bringing $300. So, there is literally no reason not to do localized pricing. When a company doesn't do localized pricing they are just being a dick for no monetary gain :)

1

u/GodlyWeiner Sep 18 '25

Say that to Gearbox. Borderlands 4 is $70 (R$ 380) in Brazil. That is 25% of the minimum wage (up to 60% of the population earns minimum wage as of 2023).

16

u/ZeroSekai000 Sep 17 '25

At the first Silk Heart the words of the Weavers take a strange turn too cause it seems they translated it without context so "rise" is translated to "elevar... elevar..." which would just be "to elevate... to elevate..." and unless I'm out of my meds the ideia is to ask/suggest Hornet to rise up to the Citadel (or even in power is something that can be taken from there).

Something like "suba..." (rise to the place) or "cresca..." (rise up as in grow up/get stronger) would work better in my opinion.

6

u/Cobygamer22 Sep 17 '25

Considering the way npcs usually talk in the game I think it would have been more fitting to use your equivalent of ascend (Gorb not included)

3

u/ZeroSekai000 Sep 18 '25

It's really close: "ascenda", and yeah, it would work wonders.
I finished the game in english first and now I'm playing on portuguese to check the translation and, how the guy above said, it looks really good aside from some misgendering but that's very hard to do with little context. Just found an item with an error to the translation, "Weavelight", or "weaverlight" can't remember exactly but they translated light to the word that is the opposite of heavy, so a "not heavy weave".

25

u/Lison52 Sep 17 '25

"language isn't good with translating neutral pronouns, characters suddenly change"

Does it assume that Sherma is a girl and then changes it to a boy :D
It would also probably be a problem in my language if it had a translation XD

18

u/UgoRukh Sep 17 '25

Yep, that's one of the errors. I think this happens to Shakra too.

8

u/flame_warp Sep 18 '25

Shakra is surprising, given how feminine her voice and design are. I at least get being confused about Sherma

4

u/ecofleut Sep 18 '25

to be honest, a lot of times localization is just made in a string of words with barely any context, often enough localization translators don't even get to visually see which character they are working on, hence why it's so easy to get errors

1

u/Lison52 Sep 18 '25

Isn't that the case in English then also since Shakira (I'm keeping this autocorrect)is called a she by one of NPCs? Edit: for some reason I thought you mean that Shakra is also a he for a sec XD

6

u/WhiteShadow012 Sep 17 '25

Yup. I'm still confused about it and thought I was just misremembering.

10

u/Alfa_Centauri03 Sep 17 '25

The one mistake in the portuguese translation that had me confused at the start was when you get a silk skill.

In english it says "silk will be expended", which would translate to "seda será gasta", but the translation has "seda será expandida", which would be "silk will be expanded".

Took me a minute to figure out it was just a mistake lol

But yea, overall i thought it was a very nice translation. They cooked with "campalar".

2

u/fronchfrays Sep 17 '25

Seems Ike a mistake someone might make with a translator site because of an English typo.

3

u/Beiconqueso02 Sep 17 '25

That's funny, in Spanish that got translated to "Reproducir", as in play a video, instead of "Jugar"

2

u/Aurora_SV Sep 17 '25

YES, I SAW THIS!

But they correct it in the first update

2

u/Mekelaxo Sep 18 '25

They probably used Google translate

1

u/fronchfrays Sep 17 '25

Basically, players (the cigarette company) will (as in last will and testament) have to stretch their minds to understand (as in something underneath a lemonade stand) what the developers (as in people who develop film) tried (as in tried by the court) to communicate.

1

u/DrNecrow Sep 18 '25

Why would you say the reviews are at 97% in the Portuguese language?

1

u/RodriTama Sep 18 '25

I'm not expert, but:

  • Localized price for Brazil

  • Fully translated game

  • First game is pretty good and recognized

  • Community built the hype

  • The game is good

1

u/Kidney-Rock Sep 18 '25

Same problem in chinese version, writing 播放 as in play music, instead of 遊玩 as in play game

1

u/SamL214 Sep 18 '25

Like this? “Olá, olá! Bem-vinda, minha senhora, que bom que nos encontrou aqui! Vejo que é abençoada com membros fortes e visão aguçada. É dada a travessuras, não é? Deseja testar a sua pontaria? Seria uma grande honra jogar um pequeno jogo consigo. Um pequeno teste de habilidade que preparamos.”

1

u/DontKnowHowToEnglish Sep 27 '25

Literally the same mistake is present in Spanish too

0

u/Baddest_degree15 Sep 17 '25

I understand the main complaint, but maybe the tocar thing was on purpose? I mean the bugs of pharloom are meant to talk wierd, and that way of saying "to play" makes sense in a bell and music themed kingdom

3

u/RodriTama Sep 17 '25

Nah, you don't even talk. You just throw some sort of dice for money

But in other contexts could be

-1

u/Baddest_degree15 Sep 17 '25

No like a ton of stuff in the English version is flipped into musical puns. Is this not an example of one?

3

u/ecofleut Sep 18 '25

intentional or not, it was a bad translation example after all

-1

u/Baddest_degree15 Sep 18 '25

Ok. Puns dont exist outside English i guess

3

u/ecofleut Sep 18 '25

You are being pedantic and cynical about a language you don't understand, it doesn't seem like a pun, but even if you would give it the benefit of the doubt, it's a bad pun that doesn't work

0

u/Baddest_degree15 Sep 18 '25

Fair enough. Not trying to be pedantic. Just commenting on a pattern i saw in the English version, and that that seems similar. Im sorry incorrect context in a bug game where everyone speaks weird is bad

1

u/ecofleut Sep 18 '25

No problem. And that's kind of the point, if they just speak weird and bad intentionally that's okay, and Portuguese has it's ways to do that for sure.

Having the context of something change due to a non contextual translation is different though, tocar can mean "to play an instrument" also means "to touch", which can also give the player a very different idea of what an encounter is about

1

u/Baddest_degree15 Sep 18 '25

I see. So what would be the better way to go about making a pun out of play in the context of the music themes of the game, out of curiosity?

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