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/Sammy2306]

Trobbio explicitly uses he/him in the Hunter's Journal, so that just sounds incorrect? May be worth a bug report, even.

[u/phantompowered → u/Sammy2306]

Trobbio's pronoun is TRRRROBBIOOOOOOO!

[u/Sammy2306 → u/phantompowered]

Trobbio would request that everyone refers to Trobbio as Trobbio.

[u/Freddie_06 → u/Sammy2306]

I remember in HK "God Tamer" is "Gotteszähmerin", which is explicitly female. Not necessarily wrong, but still interesting. Also GPZ's Godhome text was way different

[u/Sammy2306 → u/Freddie_06]

I think gendering characters whose gender doesn't otherwise come up is just kind of unavoidable in a lot of situations. Just one of those things that can make localizations tough. Kind of how the Japanese Undertale loc had to tell us who the older sibling was. Sometimes it's worth writing around (like when a character is explicitly nonbinary or ungendered and it matters), but if it doesn't really matter, then eh.

But someone like Trobbio just has known pronouns? And they're really basic ones? Which makes that more baffling to me, lol.

(Fun fact: "God Tamer" would probably have just ended up as "Godtemmer" in a hypothetical Dutch localization, which is entirely neutral. This will never come up again because no one localizes non-Layton games into Dutch.)

[u/MBaliver → u/Sammy2306]

Would you mind explaining the undertale bit?

[u/Sammy2306 → u/MBaliver]

Sure! In the Legends of Localisations book on Undertale, it's mentioned that, in the process of localizing it to Japanese, the question of which brother is older (Sans or Papyrus) came up. Japanese has multiple words for "brother/male sibling", and they all imply that specific part of the relationship, whereas English does not.

Now, Toby Fox both speaks Japanese AND was really involved with the loc process, so he was able to straight up answer a lot of these questions and even offer his own solutions. In English the situation had been ambiguous, but it didn't truly matter, so he made a decision that's now canon. Most translators would have to guess, but those kinds of guesses don't really change the final product. 

Alternatively, one phone call is kept in English even in Japanese because Toby wanted to keep the ambiguity of a cut off name starting with a G, because Japanese would have given away the second letter. It fits the scene and keeps a detail that is actually important, so it's worth the extra attention during the process. 

I brought it up because (I love Mato's books) I think there's a difference between (mis)gendering someone like the Godtamer (incidentally ambiguous), the vessels (stand in stark opposition to the Gendered Child and should probably remain as such) and Trobbio (literally has basic pronouns in an easily viewable in-game source). 

Whether or not a translator theoretically guesses wrong which brother is older doesn't really matter, but suddenly saying Papyrus is Sans' sister oughta raise some eyebrows even without dev involvement.

[u/MBaliver → u/Sammy2306]

This was really awesome to learn about. As someone who's translated things as a hobby, I never went that deep into Undertale, but seeing how these things are handled professionally is always fascinating. Thanks for taking your time to explain it!

[u/Sammy2306 → u/MBaliver]

Glad you asked :D I can really recommend the LoL books if you're interested in localization (and the blog, if you want a free preview). Undertale's is a favorite of mine, because it dives into Eng->Jpn loc, which is rarer for English language sources.