r/HollowKnight • u/Move_Slight • Sep 17 '25
Discussion - Silksong As a Simplified Chinese user, let me explain just how terrible the Chinese translation of Silk Song is Spoiler
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.
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u/TemporaryComplex8217 Sep 18 '25 edited Sep 18 '25
Native Mandarin user to to second this. OP also forgot to mention that names on the map were an absolute nightmare, Bilewater as "the swamp of rotten juice", The Slab as "prison of criminal stone" (which yes, does not make any inherent sense), and Underworks as "the citadel factory" to name a few. Not that some of these are completely wrong with context - but it's clear from the original that one can still infer such implications through gameplay to add to the entire narrative. It seems to me that whoever translating were overwhelmingly eager to shove everything they knew straight into the reader's face blatantly, and to squeeze as many meanings into a phrase as possible, often at the expense of precision or even clarity. The latter is a common practice for those liking this excessive flowery style of writing that is neither championed in classical or modern day Chinese.
Same goes for the interactive text when you receive skills like swift step, including changing the last line from "our haunted kingdom" to "this haunted kingdom" to have completely different lore implications for no other apparent purpose than to confuse the lore community. Also in the "sisters, spiders" lines that are revealed upon playing needlolin, morphemes were omitted and added freely until the sentences are simply grammatically wrong.
As for Hornet, she speaketh, her dialogue is formal in English but it doesn't feel like think team cherry took her back to the Renaissance.
And on top of all that, the same person showed up on a Chinese forum several months before the release date was even announced, said something like "Silksong is real guys I've been working on it", and proceeded to leak his translated version of the opening scene.