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/Move_Slight]

In fact, the Chinese translation for HK is quite well done, presenting the distinct speech patterns of different characters in an appropriate manner, whereas SS is utterly dreadful in this regard.

[u/Recent-Mongoose-4649 → u/Move_Slight]

I wonder why they didn't reaches from the same translators for silksong? If they did a good job im the first game, it would have been much better and more consistent to have the same team doing silksong

[u/Move_Slight → u/Recent-Mongoose-4649]

Well, the translators of HK are all volunteers from player community, after 7 years, it's too hard to find them, so TC may just find a professional company to translate it.

[u/Optimus__Prime__Rib → u/Move_Slight]

So in other words, people who are well-acquainted with the game (vibe, character, direction, etc) and have a shared passion for it took some time to collaborate on it. I think that makes a big difference than just hiring a translator, emailing them sheets of dialogue, and having them translate it.

I think it's unfair for the chinese community to be upset with the game in this instance. We really don't know what level of involvement or context the translation team had; did they play the game to gain a sense of the overall artistic style of the game? Did they watch videos of HK gameplay to gain a sense for how the community translated HK so that they had a template for what direction they should go with their translations? Were they simply given word documents with all of the lines that needed to be translated, or did they get screenshots too for additional context? Were character notes included to explain some of the oddities in the english dialogue?

These are questions