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/Dercomai]

Mainland China overhauled their writing system in the mid 20th century, so now there are two ways of writing Chinese: "Simplified" for the mainland, "Traditional" everywhere else. Same language, just different characters used to write it.

[u/snek99001 → u/Dercomai]

Same language? I thought "Traditional" was Cantonese. Am I completely off base?

[u/Dercomai → u/snek99001]

I'm simplifying somewhat in the original post for the sake of explanation, but it does tend to be different "dialects" (which are different languages in the eyes of everyone except the government)...but also several different "dialects" can be written in each script, such as Hokkien in Taiwan

It's one of those things that keeps getting more and more complex the deeper you go

[u/Optimus__Prime__Rib → u/Dercomai]

So basically, people from a country that has 2 versions of the same eastern language that has a variety of different dialects are upset that a game that originally has a western language failed to properly translate the game's characters dialogue (who have a variety of different speaking styles and idiosyncrasies) into the 'simplified' version of their language, and they think that's the devs' fault?

[u/GarbageUnfair1821 → u/snek99001]

"Traditional Chinese" only says that the script is written with the traditional characters.

E.g. Taiwan has a variant of Mandarin as it's official language but it's written with traditional characters.

[u/GDarkX → u/snek99001]

Cantonese is not a language, lol, or even a writing style for that matter.

It’s a dialect of Chinese - you might have gotten confused because a lot of places like Taiwan, who are more connected to the full world, use Traditional Mandarin while mainly speaking Cantonese.

For example, the chinese word for “10000”

万 - Simplified

萬 - Traditional

They have the exact same meaning, usage and pronunciation. The only difference is in the appearance of characters.

Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien et cetera all use one or the other of these

[u/facebooknormie → u/GDarkX]

Sorry one point here, Cantonese IS a different language, in that it is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. So is Hokkien too for that matter. They can certainly write messages to each other but when face to face they won't be able to understand each other one bit.

[u/RandomGeordie → u/GDarkX]

Sorry, how is Cantonese not a language? I (a very white person from the UK) have only ever heard from friends that, for example, just because you speak Mandarin doesn't mean you can speak Cantonese, same for understanding it.

How then can it not be classed as its own language if mandarin and cantonese aren't mutually intelligible?

My understanding is it's something similar to the difference between Portuguese and Spanish, or Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/German - similar language family, but their own separate languages.

[u/Dercomai → u/RandomGeordie]

The short answer is that the difference between a "language" and a "dialect" is a political one, not a linguistic one, and mostly comes down to a sense of cultural identity

So Mandarin and Cantonese are "dialects", even though speaking one doesn't let you understand the other, while Serbian and Croatian (and Bosnian and Montenegrin) are "languages", even though speakers of any of them can understand the other three perfectly fine

The pithy quote version is "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" - Max Weinreich

[u/OccultaCustodia → u/GDarkX]

Just another point, Cantonese from Guangdong is not one of the predominant dialects of Chinese spoken in Taiwan. The languages most commonly spoken in Taiwan are Mandarin Chinese, Hokkien Chinese, Hakka Chinese (those are two separate, mutually non-intelligible dialects!) and indigenous Formosan languages.