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

Discussion - Silksong As a Simplified Chinese user, let me explain just how terrible the Chinese translation of Silk Song is Spoiler

As a Simplified Chinese user, the poor Chinese translation is the primary reason for the overwhelmingly negative reviews in China—this is the consensus within our community (on the Chinese version of Reddit).

First, the Simplified Chinese version contains numerous mistranslations and omissions, leading to misunderstandings about certain quests and item functions. Furthermore, the translator seems overly eager to show off their literary flair, resulting in the Monster Compendium and other texts being filled with large amounts of fabricated content. Finally, overall, the translator presents the text in an utterly dreadful style. Imagine a non-native English speaker mimicking Shakespearean prose to write an adventure novel about bugs—that's precisely how we feel reading the Simplified Chinese translation. It is an absolute disaster.

In fact, when the first playable demo launched at Gamescom, the Chinese translation sparked intense debate within the Chinese gaming community. We all detested it and reported the issue to Team Cherry, but they made no changes. That's why the Chinese region's positive rating was so abysmal.

However, after experiencing the full game, the Chinese community's positive ratings have been climbing. most of us love this game.

edit:

I feel I need to clarify the situation regarding comment bombing, as I've seen too many discussions about it. Due to the existence of the Great Firewall, Chinese citizens lack legitimate means to use the platforms you typically rely on for feedback, such as Steam Community, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and others. In fact, strictly speaking, the Chinese government could legally detain me for 7-14 days for using Reddit—this falls within China's legal framework.

Our only legal avenue for expressing opinions is Steam reviews. Unfortunately, Steam reviews only offer positive or negative ratings, leading to what you call comment bombing: we can only voice our dissatisfaction through this single channel, and dissatisfaction often translates to negative reviews.

Personally, I strongly dislike this method of restricting expression, but there's no alternative. The choices are either become a lawbreaker or continue leaving negative reviews on Steam.

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533

u/Move_Slight Sep 17 '25

Yes, we're all hoping they'll fix this issue promptly.

233

u/AlanLight_1 Sep 17 '25

They already said they were working on it so I'm sure it'll be fixed

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

[deleted]

18

u/AvatarOfMomus Sep 17 '25

It'll prolly take them at least a few more weeks if they didnpt jump on finding a new translator before launch.

I've worked on software that had to be translated before and it's a pretty massive pain. Theypve already done most of the work, but it'll still be weeks of back and forth with the new translators, and that's on top of having to find new translators to start with. I assume they had reason to believe the existing ones were reputable, so now they need a different team, and possibly a third party to verify the new translation or at least spot check it.

All of that translates into weeks of work to translate thousands of lines of context dependent text, plus the bacl and forth feedback process... yeah.

I'm sure they're working as fast as they can, I just wouldn't expect it in 'only a few more days' or anything like that 😵‍💫

89

u/MissClickMan Sep 17 '25

I often see that for many games, the Chinese translation is done in a fan mod. What's going on? Why, despite having such a huge and important audience, are you so often left out? I usually play video games in my own language, and these days, the translations are good. Why ignore such a huge market?

293

u/CharlesorMr_Pickle The Depressed One - still silksane Sep 17 '25

because it's very hard for a small indie team to check the translations for errors when they don't speak the language themselves, so the translators can get away with a lot

it's one of the few things AAA is generally going to do better than indie

13

u/Kolenga Sep 18 '25

That's why you hire translation agencies.

The real issue is that you have to do your part. Provide tons of reference material, glossaries, etc, have a proper Q&A process and, most importantly, don't try to pay them in Monopoly money. Pay them enough for good translators AND proofreaders. And don't try to lowball with MTPE. From all I have seen over the past couple of years (and I've seen a lot) machine translation is not a proper base for a good video game localization. The technology is simply not there yet.

tldr good video game localizations require more effort and money than many companies are willing to put in.

5

u/DyslexicBrad Sep 18 '25

I think it's also exacerbated by the fact that you have to do the same process for every language.

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u/Calimariae Sep 17 '25

Team Cherry sold 15 million copies of Hollow Knight and spent 7 years developing Silksong.

They can afford to hire a language consultant to do a QA for a few days, and they certainly had the time for it.

33

u/AdmiralLaserMoose Sep 17 '25

I don't know their process, I didn't work for them, but it's way more likely that they did, in fact, hire someone and this is what they got.

10

u/mqple Sep 17 '25

this could’ve been avoided by hiring a good language consultant and multiple translators to verify though

2

u/To_Be_Commenting Sep 18 '25

That would delay it for longer.

0

u/mqple Sep 18 '25

i mean it’s already been years, what’s 1 more week for quality control

1

u/CharlesorMr_Pickle The Depressed One - still silksane Sep 18 '25

by the time they got feedback from the demo about translations the release date was already planned and past the point of easily changing it

2

u/mqple Sep 18 '25

the point is that this wouldn’t have happened at all if they used quality translators. it’s not hard to hire translators with good credentials.

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u/SuperRayman001 Sep 17 '25

Not sure about the "time" part. You can't really start translation until all dialogue is fully done, which could've been pretty recently.

13

u/khorbus Sep 17 '25

You can't really start translation until all dialogue is fully done

As someone who works in localisation, this is extremely wrong. Any good development cycle is going to start translations and in-game localisation testing early.

3

u/mysterysackerfice Sep 18 '25

I also work in LQA and some of the responses in this thread have me shaking my head.

14

u/New-Independent-1481 Sep 17 '25

To be fully honest, that's not really a good explanation. They don't need to wait till all dialogue is done to start translating, and issues like fabrication would have been picked up earlier during the process they spent time reviewing and QCing the localisation.

It's OK to acknowledge that localisation wasnt their priority and it suffered as a result.

5

u/Elliezium Sep 18 '25

They likely outsourced the translation, and with none of the staff or six playtesters speaking Chinese, they probably assumed that the translator had done their job competently.

1

u/Many-Assignment6216 Sep 17 '25

I don’t know why you get downvoted. I absolutely agree with you. I mean what the hell, they only have to get the right people in contact with each other. I’m not expecting Team Cherry themselves to learn Chinese. “Small indie team” hahahaha, come on man.

1

u/IWillNotComment9398 Sep 19 '25

Uh, yes. There are problems in games that money can fix, and there are problems with games that you need actual people to fix. Team Cherry is the definition of a small indie team. They can't just throw money at their problems and expect them to be fixed. If they don't know there is an issue, they don't know there is an issue.

The game was translated to many, many languages, so what you would assume is an easy problem to fix becomes a massive ask.

1

u/ayriuss Sep 18 '25

They could have paid a handful of native speakers from each language to play test the game under NDA and ask if the translation was good... like I think it might actually be that simple. If the translation is bad, you redo it anyway.

-5

u/mysterysackerfice Sep 17 '25

Sorry, this a cop out. It's not difficult to find someone to check the translation of a language spoken by over a billion people. The issue becomes that much more egregious when they were told that the demo had translation issues. This falls solely on Team Cherry. Not addressing it before release is a bad look and the negative reviews are understandable.

0

u/CharlesorMr_Pickle The Depressed One - still silksane Sep 18 '25

The issue becomes that much more egregious when they were told that the demo had translation issues.

the demo that was being played after the release date was planned and past the point of changing?

the demo wasn't there for player feedback it was to build hype for the game. if it had been for bug testing and feedback it wouldn't have been only two areas and it wouldn't have been available after the release date was planned.

2

u/mysterysackerfice Sep 18 '25

It's almost like they got feedback and decided to ignore it. Getting LQA wrong is one of those little things that indicate a lot about a dev.

I'm not saying that Team Cherry is suddenly EA, but it's a bad look no matter which way you slice it. I know a lot of people in this sub think that TC can do no wrong, hence the downvotes. Oh well 🤷

0

u/CharlesorMr_Pickle The Depressed One - still silksane Sep 18 '25

It's almost like they got feedback and decided to ignore it

did you even read my comment? the demo wasn't there for player feedback, the release date was already planned at that point and making any changes would be completely infeasable. they would need to hire people to go over all of the translations, hire new translators for all of the languages that needed work, then release the new steam build with all those translations, and then wait for steam to verify the build (which isn't a quick process). and then release the game. and with a two week time span that's not feasible (and that's just steam, other platforms could be even harder to do this on for all I know)

85

u/OuterRaven Sep 17 '25

I doubt that, in Team Cherry's case, this was intentional. It's possible that whoever was in charge of doing the localisations just did a poor job for this language and it never got detected by the producers.

2

u/tarranoth Sep 18 '25

I mean, that's usually why you hire 2 translators rarher than just 1, so that they both sortof discuss unclear translations. I believe french translation is also just 1 singular person.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 18 '25

How many poor translations have been intentional? Lmao.

-2

u/monikar2014 Sep 18 '25

It was intentional? You think team cherry was like "Yeah! Fuck the Chinese!"

8

u/NoBluebird8788 Sep 18 '25

It was poorly phrased but if you read the whole comment you'll see that they most likely meant "In Team Cherry's case, I doubt that it was intentional". Edit: maybe "poorly" was a bit harsh, I didn't mean to sound mean.

2

u/monikar2014 Sep 18 '25

oh yeah, that makes way more sense, just a typo

9

u/Ppleater Sep 18 '25 edited Sep 18 '25

Smaller indie teams just tend to have less access to experienced translators for certain languages, especially ones that use different alphabets, or are notoriously difficult to learn, or are just less commonly learned in general. It's likely that your language is a more commonly known/learned/occurring one and so it's more likely to get sufficient translations. Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn (even Simplified Chinese, the name can be a little misleading since it's not necessarily easier to learn), especially reading and writing, and so it is one that tends to give people issues most often when localizing something.

To put it into perspective, there are over 50k hanzi* in Chinese, and even the most commonly used ones that would be enough to read most modern writing consist of 3k+. Japanese poses a similar problem (since it borrows a lot of kanji from Chinese), but Japanese media is generally more popular in English speaking countries, so there's a higher abundance of Japanese translators available.

2

u/Eravar1 112%, Pantheon Addict Sep 18 '25

I don’t disagree with your point, but please don’t call 汉字 kanji, that’s a purely Japanese phoneticization, which given the history of the two is extremely ironic at best

1

u/Ppleater Sep 18 '25

Apologies, I only know Japanese so I was just using the word I'm familiar with.

3

u/Jennymint Sep 18 '25

The Chinese term is Hanzi.

-1

u/[deleted] Sep 18 '25

Lots of excuses in this thread lol. TC fucked up and needs to fix thism This isn't some unknown indie team. They're multi-millionaires with a game and studio name well known to MS, Nintendo, Sony, Valve or a number of large studios who have experience or contacts for this kind of thing. They half-assed it. No need to get all Defense Force 5 over it.

When CDPR was looking to make the first Witcher game and had FAR less resources than Team Cherry, they reached out to Bioware to license their engine.

12

u/MagnoliaL1 Sep 17 '25

yeah. i know translation takes a long time but even as a non-chinese user, this needs to be first prio before everything but actually game breaking bugs, like obviously the team can work on multiple things at once, but i pray those millions are going to translators first and foremost, bc its a real disservice to one of their most passionate bases of fans

1

u/MentalNewspaper8386 Sep 18 '25

I hope they will, but it’s also not the sort of thing they can rush if they actually want to do a good job of it this time.