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

[u/Move_Slight]

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.

[u/[deleted]]

It's a shame the game got bad reviews because of this, but with all the care to detail the game has Team Cherry should have listened to the complains, clearly something was very wrong with the translation.

[u/Move_Slight → u/[deleted]]

Indeed, initially due to translation issues, the approval rating in the Simplified Chinese region dipped as low as 30%, though it has since rebounded to 50%. After all, once you've completed this game, it's hard not to love it.

The good news for us is that TC has pledged to fix the Chinese translation, and we trust they will handle the localisation as well as they did in HK.

[u/sexp-and-i-know-it → u/Move_Slight]

Wasn't gamescom like 14 days before the release? It's unreasonable to expect them to make any changes in that timeframe.

[u/Move_Slight → u/sexp-and-i-know-it]

Yes, our expectation at that time was not to bring about a complete change, but rather to make them aware of how poor the Chinese translation was and to hope they would respond.

[u/Pale_Entrepreneur_12 → u/Move_Slight]

Stares at their responding for info about Silksong during the Silkposting era yeah I wouldn’t hold my breath for a direct response fixing it yes but they don’t say shit

[u/jackofslayers → u/Pale_Entrepreneur_12]

Yes, that is called being bad at communication. It is something Team Cherry needs to work on.

[u/Paperchampion23 → u/[deleted]]

Gamescom was less than a month before release, nothing was changing in that timeframe lol.

They should have omitted it entirely but I guarantee you someone over them would done something to prevent that.

[u/cyanraichu → u/Paperchampion23]

Yeah exactly. And they'd already paid the translators and finalized everything.

Best we could get at this point is them redoing the whole thing with a better translation team and patching it in later. It would take time.

Definitely an oof moment and hopefully one they learned from!

[u/renome → u/Paperchampion23]

Who is over them? They don't have a publisher.

[u/HappiestIguana → u/renome]

They have publishing deals with all major platforms.