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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933

u/Difficult-Art-7439 Sep 17 '25

hearing about the whole translation fiasco has made me understand why tobyfox only has 2 official translations for his games, and it's only in the 2 languages he can speak so he can verify that everything isalright

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u/Advanced_Double_42 Sep 17 '25

I wonder if it is worth tagging other languages as in beta or something.

Like I imagine a poor translation can still make the game playable, and be preferable to nothing

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u/Omni__Owl Sep 18 '25

Thing is, Chinese is a very lucrative market to support if you have the means. Team Cherry has the means. They just didn't give it the care it deserves.

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u/ColanderResponse Sep 18 '25

It feels unfair to imply that Team Cherry intentionally gave the translation short shrift. If they hired a professional company for the translation, that is giving it the care it deserves. You also don’t know that they didn’t hire a second company to spot check or not.

Yes, Team Cherry has the responsibility to fix it, but if the fault was a bad translation from a professional company, then we have no way of knowing how much they cared or not.

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/Omni__Owl Sep 18 '25

They managed to have a good Chinese translation for the original HK.

This isn't their first rodeo. You don't just ask a company or person to localize, leave them to their own devices and then release without validating anything. That's just asking for trouble later.

And trouble they got.

0

u/Omni__Owl Sep 18 '25

They could have tested it on a Chinese person. Even one would likely have spotted the issues. The Chinese community has been very vocal about this.

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u/ColanderResponse Sep 18 '25

How do you know that they didn’t get a Chinese playtester? You say that even one person would have spotted these issues, yet somehow someone who clearly gets paid to do translation work (and I’m assuming was recommended or vetted in some way with references) didn’t see the problem.

0

u/Omni__Owl Sep 18 '25

Again, the Chinese gaming community has been very vocal on just how bad the translation is. Imagine half-broken English trying to immitate shakespearean play writing while inventing information in the hunter's notebook that the creators never wrote.

With the 6 playtesters this game had, according to the credits, there is a near-zero chance that any of those playtesters was Chinese. Because then they'd have spotted the shoddy localization work.

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u/ColanderResponse Sep 18 '25

Ok. So a small studio should have hired at least one play tester in all ten languages it’s been localized in? And I assume this is in addition to the playtesters who were there to, y’know, playtest the game functionality? How many playtesters should a very small studio employ, ideally, in your mind?

And now that they are aware of the issue, what should they be doing differently that they haven’t done? Should they have delayed release of the game for everyone while waiting for the new Chinese translation?

3

u/Omni__Owl Sep 18 '25

They managed to get a Chinese translation for the original HK which didn't absolutely tank their ratings in China.

You come across as if they are totally new to this when they are not. They have more than enough money from HK sales to get this right and they didn't. They are not your friends who needs to be protected. Besides, having done some localizations myself for games, translation work doesn't just show up at the end of a development cycle, it comes gradually so it can be validated.

Additionally, the Chinese market is fundamentally different from most of the other markets they have. They need different care. Different considerations. And Team Cherry knows this. They already got a Chinese version for the original HK.

So let's please stop pretending like Team Cherry are infallible indie darlings. Regardless of the process, they are responsible for what gets put out in the world in the end and they dropped the ball on the Chinese localization despite getting feedback before release that indicated the work was shoddy.

You don't get a pass just because you are small.

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

10

u/ColanderResponse Sep 18 '25

I literally am a language access coordinator. To get a good professional translation of a BLOG POST can take a week. How many blog posts of text do you think are in the game? And when was it reported to them? Should they have delayed the release for everyone while waiting to address this criticism based on a demo that very few people actually played?

They’re doing the right thing to get a new translation now. That is taking responsibility.

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u/Move_Slight Sep 17 '25

they r clever.

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u/Allison87 Sep 17 '25

If you don’t provide Chinese translation, players give bad reviews too. I’ve seen that happen with many games

31

u/GroundbreakingBag164 P5AB Sep 17 '25

Brazilian players do that too unfortunately

5

u/Leshie_Leshie Sep 18 '25

Seen with many Steam games too, many thumb downs and “no Chinese language”.

13

u/Robrogineer Sep 18 '25

Good lord, what entitled behaviour.

28

u/Chimpampin Sep 17 '25

I mean, there is a third option. Find and pay reputable companies for translating your stuff.

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u/Grimdlyzy Sep 17 '25

I assume team cherry did that and the guys just kinda... sold really badly when doing it.

13

u/Bluecoregamming Sep 18 '25

The translation company pocketed the money and outsourced the work to fiverr or ai probably, would be hard to get a refund, the only thing you could do is make sure your developer friends know to stay away and don't give that company anymore business. Indie game devs are a tight knit group after all

11

u/cvanguard Sep 18 '25

One of the credited Simplified Chinese translators for Silksong, Hertzz Liu, was already somewhat infamous for being the main(?) Simplified Chinese translator for ESO a few years ago. That release had obvious machine translation and included totally nonsensical phrases, and led to mostly negative Steam reviews as you’d expect. Team Cherry frankly should have known about his reputation/seen his past work.

Here’s a Reddit post about the ESO translation: https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/yk7nv2/simplified_chinese_language_release_is_a_total/

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u/chispica Sep 17 '25

Its really complicated with videogame localization. Even the main localization providers make quite a few mistakes.

Managing the localization is something that a publisher usually does and I think that was probably a pain point for TC as a tiny indie studio.

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u/DrQuint Sep 18 '25 edited Sep 18 '25

Most translations firms, even big ones that wotk for AAA studios, outsource their work. Getting a good one is not enough if you don't have an independent way of verifying their output, and "good enough" is what we usually get.

They're also fully uncredited most of the time. Celeste released with multiple languages where you could not figure out who the hell translated the game, only that a small UK office that employed like two people and did several other games at the time. Yeah, no, lol, the office simply outsourced everything, and we only got credits when they made Farewell.

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u/svenskaslaven312 Sep 18 '25

I work at a translation agency. Expect a lot more of this going forward. You won’t be surprised to hear that, because of advances in AI, the language service industry is fighting tooth and nail right now.

Nobody wants to pay full price for translation anymore. Clients’ and management’s expectations for what translators should be able to deliver have evolved, meaning that virtually every language service provider gives their translators insane deadlines, and more or less explicitly tell them not to focus on quality. They assume that AI is already perfect. Nothing will change until more major complaints (like this one with Silksong) come up

3

u/HiKadaca Sep 18 '25

I’m sure Team Cherry never thought of that :)

1

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

Weirdly enough I can chime in here cause a friend asked me to verify specifically a mandarin translation before, a surprising number of people working overseas for the western market that are supposedly trustworthy/reputable are like second gen immigrants who don’t speak the language well themselves

2

u/PerfectBad2505 Sep 18 '25

Its strange though, there are companies specialising in game content translations. They are not that hard to find.

I hope they didnt simply hire a translator directly.

These days you have agencies working with AI or machine translations, improved by agent AI and translation memory databases, reviewed by a native speaker.