Hollow Knight: Silksong sinks to 'Mixed' Steam review status among Chinese gamers over its bafflingly bad translation, with Team Cherry promising to improve it

Not a bug/won't fix

"Xi Jingping Winnie the Pooh Moron"

Somebody set up us the review bomb.

When were those days again?

I whined about the FF7 localization for years. Eventually met one of the guys in charge for separate reasons and whined at him about it. We were both quite old by then.

Some local games media in the late 90s and early 2000s here had a policy that no localization or bad localization would knock 1 to 2 points off the review score automatically, regardless of how good or bad the rest of the game was.

Did we?

So this itsy tiny company, called CD Project. You know what they started as? Locolisation for the Polish market because there was no standards. That's their claim to fame before ever starting on a game themselves.

Your comment has to be an anecdotal. Because games lived and died by localisations. Game like Gothic is legendary in Europe but the English version was quite lack luster and even though the games were vastly superior to elder scrolls, they couldn't penetrate.

From what I've heard, Chinese gamers are significantly more likely to leave a negative review if there are issues. I don't know if that's good or bad. I think it's good for consumers to demand the products they buy to be as good as possible, but it also just makes developers want to avoid them, or do things like Steam has and separate reviews by language by default.

From the Kotaku article linked by PCGamer:

According to localization expert Loek van Kooten, one of the main issues is that Silksong‘s evocative but concise writing has been turned into “a high-school drama club’s Elizabethan improv night” in the Chinese versions. He cites the following as an example of how the prose reads:

With nary a spirit nor thought shalt thou persist, bereft of mortal will, unbent, unswayed. With no lament nor tearful cry, only sorrow’s dirge to herald thine eternal woe. Born of gods and of the fathomless abyss, grasping heaven’s firmament in thine unworthy palm. Shackled to endless dream, tormented by pestilence and shadow, thy heart besieged by phantasmal demons. Thou art the chalice of destiny. Verily, thou art the Primordial Knight of Hollowness.

Van Kooten goes on to point out that one of two of Silksong‘s Chinese translators, listed as Hertzz Liu in the credits, had a habit of gloating about their involvement in the game and leaking small details about the development process over the summer prior to its release this week.

I took a quick look at the English dialogue and it reads nothing like the example above. If the Chinese translation is really like that, then the tone is indeed quite different.

Kotaku also quotes the following from a Steam review:

First, the god-awful Chinese translation that everyone is mocking. It’s not just pretentious, pseudo-artistic nonsense—the phrasing and even the localization of place names are an absolute mess. I don’t understand how Hollow Knight’s fantastic, quotable translation turned into this unsalvageable heap of garbage in Silksong. The utterly idiotic localization has even affected the game’s world-building and storytelling, forcing me to guess at character relationships and main plot points. Thankfully, the combat holds up, or else I’d be completely disgusted.

While I can't verify it myself, considering the state of JP→EN translation I don't find any of this unbelievable. The complaints line up in what I see in English releases of Japanese games: Misplaced anachronistic language, altered world building, characters and major plot points changed sometimes dramatically (or even cut completely), not to mention unprofessional conduct by the translation team.

Buying a game because it claims it is available in your language and then getting served an awful, nonsensical translation is absolutely not a stupid reason to leave a bad review.

A game having a bad translation in your language is a valid concern, and not "stupid shit".

Didn't steam just change the reviews to be aggregated per language? So Chinese or Russian review bombs won't effect the rating that you see any longer.

I've stopped caring about steam reviews completely. Too often I have bought a game that was reviewed as overwhelmingly positive and it turned out to be some boring ass niche game. At least I got them refunded.

I actually don't know if it's Steam or Enhanced Steam but there's a way to filter reviews by language. It's really neat to see something like overwhelmingly positive in one country, and mixed/negative in another country.

As a translator, I wanna say that translation isn't a simple conversion of words when it comes to story. It takes longer than that to translate a good story of 50 pages because you have to make sure you understand the story and even the unwritten parts of it to convey the right nuance and tone.