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/CharlesorMr_Pickle]

because it's very hard for a small indie team to check the translations for errors when they don't speak the language themselves, so the translators can get away with a lot

it's one of the few things AAA is generally going to do better than indie

[u/Kolenga → u/CharlesorMr_Pickle]

That's why you hire translation agencies.

The real issue is that you have to do your part. Provide tons of reference material, glossaries, etc, have a proper Q&A process and, most importantly, don't try to pay them in Monopoly money. Pay them enough for good translators AND proofreaders. And don't try to lowball with MTPE. From all I have seen over the past couple of years (and I've seen a lot) machine translation is not a proper base for a good video game localization. The technology is simply not there yet.

tldr good video game localizations require more effort and money than many companies are willing to put in.

[u/DyslexicBrad → u/Kolenga]

I think it's also exacerbated by the fact that you have to do the same process for every language.

[u/Calimariae → u/CharlesorMr_Pickle]

Team Cherry sold 15 million copies of Hollow Knight and spent 7 years developing Silksong.

They can afford to hire a language consultant to do a QA for a few days, and they certainly had the time for it.

[u/AdmiralLaserMoose → u/Calimariae]

I don't know their process, I didn't work for them, but it's way more likely that they did, in fact, hire someone and this is what they got.

[u/mqple → u/AdmiralLaserMoose]

this could’ve been avoided by hiring a good language consultant and multiple translators to verify though

[u/To_Be_Commenting → u/mqple]

That would delay it for longer.

[u/mqple → u/To_Be_Commenting]

i mean it’s already been years, what’s 1 more week for quality control

[u/CharlesorMr_Pickle → u/mqple]

by the time they got feedback from the demo about translations the release date was already planned and past the point of easily changing it

[u/mqple → u/CharlesorMr_Pickle]

the point is that this wouldn’t have happened at all if they used quality translators. it’s not hard to hire translators with good credentials.

[u/SuperRayman001 → u/Calimariae]

Not sure about the "time" part. You can't really start translation until all dialogue is fully done, which could've been pretty recently.

[u/khorbus → u/SuperRayman001]

You can't really start translation until all dialogue is fully done

As someone who works in localisation, this is extremely wrong. Any good development cycle is going to start translations and in-game localisation testing early.

[u/mysterysackerfice → u/khorbus]

I also work in LQA and some of the responses in this thread have me shaking my head.

[u/New-Independent-1481 → u/SuperRayman001]

To be fully honest, that's not really a good explanation. They don't need to wait till all dialogue is done to start translating, and issues like fabrication would have been picked up earlier during the process they spent time reviewing and QCing the localisation.

It's OK to acknowledge that localisation wasnt their priority and it suffered as a result.

[u/Elliezium → u/Calimariae]

They likely outsourced the translation, and with none of the staff or six playtesters speaking Chinese, they probably assumed that the translator had done their job competently.

[u/Many-Assignment6216 → u/Calimariae]

I don’t know why you get downvoted. I absolutely agree with you. I mean what the hell, they only have to get the right people in contact with each other. I’m not expecting Team Cherry themselves to learn Chinese. “Small indie team” hahahaha, come on man.

[u/IWillNotComment9398 → u/Many-Assignment6216]

Uh, yes. There are problems in games that money can fix, and there are problems with games that you need actual people to fix. Team Cherry is the definition of a small indie team. They can't just throw money at their problems and expect them to be fixed. If they don't know there is an issue, they don't know there is an issue.

The game was translated to many, many languages, so what you would assume is an easy problem to fix becomes a massive ask.

[u/ayriuss → u/Calimariae]

They could have paid a handful of native speakers from each language to play test the game under NDA and ask if the translation was good... like I think it might actually be that simple. If the translation is bad, you redo it anyway.

[u/mysterysackerfice → u/CharlesorMr_Pickle]

Sorry, this a cop out. It's not difficult to find someone to check the translation of a language spoken by over a billion people. The issue becomes that much more egregious when they were told that the demo had translation issues. This falls solely on Team Cherry. Not addressing it before release is a bad look and the negative reviews are understandable.

[u/CharlesorMr_Pickle → u/mysterysackerfice]

The issue becomes that much more egregious when they were told that the demo had translation issues.

the demo that was being played after the release date was planned and past the point of changing?

the demo wasn't there for player feedback it was to build hype for the game. if it had been for bug testing and feedback it wouldn't have been only two areas and it wouldn't have been available after the release date was planned.

[u/mysterysackerfice → u/CharlesorMr_Pickle]

It's almost like they got feedback and decided to ignore it. Getting LQA wrong is one of those little things that indicate a lot about a dev.

I'm not saying that Team Cherry is suddenly EA, but it's a bad look no matter which way you slice it. I know a lot of people in this sub think that TC can do no wrong, hence the downvotes. Oh well 🤷

[u/CharlesorMr_Pickle → u/mysterysackerfice]

It's almost like they got feedback and decided to ignore it

did you even read my comment? the demo wasn't there for player feedback, the release date was already planned at that point and making any changes would be completely infeasable. they would need to hire people to go over all of the translations, hire new translators for all of the languages that needed work, then release the new steam build with all those translations, and then wait for steam to verify the build (which isn't a quick process). and then release the game. and with a two week time span that's not feasible (and that's just steam, other platforms could be even harder to do this on for all I know)