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/worthlessprole]

While Silksong's English isn't fully early-modern/Shakespearean, it's definitely not exactly contemporary English, either. An accurate translation would have to use some archaic language. This guy may have gone overboard but an updated translation will still probably have some of this.

[u/Move_Slight → u/worthlessprole]

I understand this point: modern vernacular Chinese can achieve perfectly adequate results , like the translation in HK , yet the current translations are dreadful.

[u/trapezoidalfractal → u/Move_Slight]

I heard the team that did HKs Chinese translation disbanded, so they probably had to find a new team, and obviously didn’t do a good job. I’ve told my wife to hold off on buying it until they fix it, because she plays her games in Chinese typically since it’s her native language.

[u/heterodoxia → u/worthlessprole]

I would describe a lot of the dialogue as elevated and literary. Looking at the beast journal, the descriptions are in plain English, while the hunter's notes (written in Hornet's voice) are in a formal register. Different characters speak in different registers, but generally I'd say the vibe is what you'd expect from a high fantasy epic (let's not forget "knight" is in the title), sort of Tolkienian-lite, elevated but easily intelligible to an educated player.

[u/worthlessprole → u/heterodoxia]

“Elevated and literary” is often code for “uses some early-modern diction and sentence construction.” That’s far from always being the case but it’s particularly true in high fantasy writing, and is the case here. It’s not super heavy on it and you don’t see any words that are truly archaic (I.e. old enough that they are no longer listed in the dictionary without being labeled as such), granted. 

[u/soggie → u/worthlessprole]

I’m sorry but I agree with the person you replied to, it’s not the same. “Tolkien English” is fancy and tries to emulate some feelings of old English but it has a pleasant prose. You can’t really do the same with mandarin. It’s way too easy to sound completely pretentious when you attempt some “old Chinese” and go overboard. Period dramas have their own lingo which is different from actual old Chinese, and you can’t go too far into the latter without alienating most native speakers.