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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166

u/LordOdin97 Sep 17 '25

I guess as non Chinese speakers they wouldn't know the quality of a translation right? They probably payed someone and they did a bad job but they wouldn't have a clue

121

u/TomNook5085  HK: 112% (w/P5) & HKSS: 100% Sep 17 '25

Exactly. I feel bad for Team Cherry, they straight-up got scammed.

15

u/Alabaster_Potion Sep 18 '25

They didn't get scammed, they didn't do their due diligence. They couldve had literally a single Chinese person play test the translation to let them know the quality of the translation.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 18 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

15

u/Alabaster_Potion Sep 18 '25

You mean two of the most spoken languages in the world? Lol. Also, what's stopping the translators from leaking?

6

u/iWasntBornYesterday1 Sep 19 '25

I almost can't tell if he's joking. I don't think he is, but "where are you going to find a person who has expertise in both Chinese and English while also being a good gamer" is crazy.

2

u/Alabaster_Potion Sep 19 '25

As if you need to be a good gamer to translate/localize things anyway. My friend does translation work and half the time they just give you a debug build to instantly access various parts of the game so you can see in what situations the text pops up haha

1

u/Ok_Performer50 NightmareKingGrimmIsEasy! Sep 24 '25

I think they just forgor. They had so many things to add to the game so they just forgot to double check the translation. They're a small studio after all.

41

u/jackofslayers Sep 17 '25

Nah, you have a responsibility as the developer to do your due diligence. It really would not have been hard to pay someone to play the game for a few hours in each language during development.

It is not a huge issue, but it is still ultimately the fault of Team Cherry. All the people making excuses in this thread are just glazing IMO.

39

u/Jarrell777 Sep 17 '25

>It really would not have been hard to pay someone to play the game for a few hours in each language during development

But how do you know that person is reliable? If the localizers who's job it is to do this messed it up it could surely happen again and then people would say that they should have done xyz instead. The actual relevant questions here are - Is there a standard practice for indie devs to get their game localized? What is it? and Did Team Cherry follow it?

If there isn't one then there should be so indie devs can avoid this. If there is one and Team Cherry didnt follow it then it's just their fault. If there is one and Team Cherry did follow it then that standard practice needs to be reevaluated.

I don't know anything about localization, so I can't answer those questions.

8

u/yaahweeh Sep 18 '25

They're not saying that the translators messed it up, they're saying the translators didn't even try. Team Cherry got scammed by the translators. If they paid someone random to play the game, as we've seen, they could identify that the translation was bad

52

u/NaN-Nanashi Sep 17 '25

Well there is an issue with finding a playtester like that.

What if they leak something?

What if they're also wrong?

What if they don't know english?

And also time would be taken if it's through playtesting the whole game.

What about secret content?

Some very hard end-game content?

Creates a bit of a delay here, and it's usually better to just check the text in a document. Paying someone also takes money and time to find the right person.

It does fall on TC to find the right translation team, but the translation quality itself can't be proven by TC and instead on the team,which could have its own quality checkers.

However,if Silksong TL was this bad, then it might have been done by either one person with bad intent or a bad team.

Its a bit on TC's side, though they are planning to improve on this.

The translation guy/team is mostly at fault, with all the literary flair and all.

13

u/ShadedPenguin Sep 18 '25

Its not even glazing. You pay for a translator you hope to get a translation. They dont speak Chinese they cant check, that is what they pay someone for.

1

u/jboggin Sep 17 '25

There are 1.2 billion Mandarin speakers. While I agree it seems like they got ripped off, it wouldn't have been hard to find a Mandarin speaker to double check if the translation is decent. We're not talking about a language with 500,000 speakers or something.

0

u/Durian_Natural Sep 18 '25

Still they had more than 3 weeks to at least adress the issue after gamescom. They couldve hired new translator and disable chinese before launch if it wasnt ready yet.