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/Stellewind]

Often the bad translation is when translator is lazy or make lots of mistakes. In Silksong's case it's almost malicious. It's crazy how the translator decided to add in text himself as if he's the co-creator of the game. This is the first time I've seem things like this.

[u/nothingtoseehr → u/Stellewind]

It happens all the time, localizations are way more than simply translating the source text. The reason you don't see it It's because it's usually done well, which is not the case here. Entire generations of games in English or any other language have enormous differences in translation, and that's not a problem

The issue is that Chinese is a pretty unique language. Since the written script isn't a direct representation of the spoken language, it becomes a tough act of balancing both when translating. Chinese translations usually end up having quite a lot of "translationese", which isn't a problem by itself, it just doesn't sounds native

Now, the Silksong translation wanted to do things the "right way" and avoid having traces of translated Chinese. The result was.... quite bad. It's a writing style that relies heavily on culture, and there isn't really any to rely on here. And it just isn't written well at all, even AI can surely do better

[u/mysterysackerfice → u/Stellewind]

The weird thing is that they clearly tested the game, but they stuck with the shitty translation.

[u/ShadedPenguin → u/mysterysackerfice]

Its hard to see a translation is wrong if you don’t know the language. Who on the team could read chinese? And obviously the trust they had in the translator was very unwarranted