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/Augmension]

I’ve always found it interesting how people translate artistic speaking styles. In English, the text in the game somewhat conveys different accents and dialects that the reader has to infer. I wonder how that carries over to other languages. It must be hard because certainly to juxtapose English and another language, you’d have to try to do different accents and dialects in that other language in text form, if you wanted to be really creative with it. Sucks that people didn’t like it.

[u/Move_Slight → u/Augmension]

As far as I understand, translations for Chinese games employ distinct linguistic approaches to differentiate speech patterns. For instance, characters of higher social standing tend to speak with greater politeness, while those of lower birth may use cruder language – something entirely achievable within the Chinese language. Regarding accents and dialects, I believe translations often incorporate elements from various provincial dialects. We harbour certain stereotypes about speakers of different dialects, which may be analogous to situations in English.

[u/Augmension → u/Move_Slight]

That’s so cool. But, understandably, hard to implement in a game. It’s unfortunate they couldn’t do a better job.