don’t speak a language

have no idea yourself how the end product will turn out

every person you hire has to be trusted with a grain of salt and you have to take them at their word

Nightmare, but now that the game is out, it isn’t like the content is under Fort Knox anymore and they can peer review it with the community until its right.

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.

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.

You know how bad things are when I searched for some examples and the first result is a localization mod.

That is very close to the English text of both the original Hollow Knight and Silksong.

Opening game description:

"They see your beauty, so frail and fine,

They see your peace, woven of faith and toil,

They forget your heart, bound in slumber and servitude,

When you wake they shall see your truth"

Dialogue

“May you ease your shell within, that your strength renewed can carry you higher.”

“this is the final bell, it shall be rang the last time ever.”

“Scoundrel! Fiend! Who dares wake brave Garmond from his well needed kip?”

“Hold there sister! A great beast stalks this land, swooping and screeching like an ill mannered tyrant!”

The HK games deliberately exist and speak in dramatic and archaic language in a world with knights, citadels, legends and lords.

All your reviews are belong to us. You have no chance to positive. Make your time.

Wait did they include the mewtwo quote from the first Pokémon movie in hollow knight??

Thank you, I thought that one sounded familiar! Let me take it out until I can confirm.

I can confirm Garmond’s exclamations.

That is very close to the English text of both the original Hollow Knight and Silksong.

I disagree. If the original is a 3 or 4 on the dramatic and archaic language scale then the translation is a 8+ which definitely changes the tone. Compare the lines you posted with the retranslated quote.

Let me give you the example from my previous comment in its original context:

Global reviews praised Silksong into the stratosphere, with a glowing 92% positivity. In China, however, the numbers plummeted almost immediately to 76% 52%. And the reason could not be hidden: it was the localization. Complaints date back to the August demo, when awkward word choices like 苔穴 (‘moss-hole’) raised eyebrows. Despite repeated feedback, the translation team brushed off criticism—changing their social media bios to ‘don’t comment if you don’t understand.’ That defiance only inflamed players further. What players found on screen was not the brisk, lyrical, elegant style that had carried the first Hollow Knight to such acclaim, but a swamp of overwrought archaisms, a self-indulgent carnival of tangled phrasing that felt less like modern Chinese and more like a Qing-dynasty soap opera written by someone pretending to be Shakespeare.

To illustrate the calamity, one need only place the original Hollow Knight’s translation beside Silksong’s.

The original:

No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry out in suffering. Born of God and Void. You are the Vessel. You are the Hollow Knight.

Concise. Clean. Haunting.

Now behold the Silksong version, which players were forced to endure — rendered here in English as the grotesque monstrosity it resembled:

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.

One can imagine the reaction. Players did not feel immersed in Pharloom; they felt trapped in a high-school drama club’s Elizabethan improv night. Instead of fighting for survival, they were decoding riddles with the cadence of a failed King James Bible. It is impossible to perform platforming precision when the screen itself sounds like a plague sermon.

And another example, also with English retranslation: Image

Edit: I should note just in case, that the image above is a parody: this is what some Chinese players feel the new team would have localized the lines above from the first game.

I don’t see how that delivers the “equivalent experience” that a faithful localization is meant to provide to the target language reader.

There are several things to keep in mind:

The official Chinese itself makes literary sense, and is within the dramatic, haunting medieval atmosphere of the games.

From what I can read(I lived in China for 7 years and have translated Chinese wuxia comics), the Silksong quotes you shared have been search-engine retranslated to English to be unnecessarily and deliberately obscure.

The first Silksong line can easily be retranslated differently; a literal Google translation of a translation will obviously yield unsatisfying translations. Do you know the original English quotes translated into Chinese?

The Silksong translators have apparently chosen to use words like “without” rather than “no” for dramatic effect. You can translate the character for “without” as no, but the irate fans have not.

The Silksong translators have chosen to be more dramatic and poetic this time around.

It’s completely fair that people don’t like them, but the official Chinese translations themselves are not as complicated as they are being presented and fit within the poetry and medieval drama of HK.

Someone set us up the bomb.

Yeah. We laughed real hard at shitty localizations and ad even loved the games still.

Somebody set up us the bomb.

Zero Wing is quite a hard game to love, tho. That phenomenal opening is followed up by a very mid Gradius knock-off. I’d probably have chosen Symphony Of The Night as the best game with an awful translation - voice acted by native speakers, too.

I’ve never played either game but I’ll be honest: that English text looks really pretentious to me. I can imagine how bad things could get if that were carried over into the Chinese translation.

Everyday Chinese speech is very plain, blunt, and utilitarian. The Great Classical Chinese novels are anything but. They are as important (arguably even more so) to Chinese as Shakespeare is to English. Speaking in that style should come off just as pretentious in Chinese as a video game character speaking Shakespearean style would in English. Generally, in English fiction (especially TV shows), characters are brutally mocked for speaking in that style unless they are literally reading, rehearsing, or performing Shakespeare.

The search-engine retranslated English from Chinese from English is very obscure.

Some Chinese is blunt, some is poetic.

Some English is blunt, some is poetic.

Original Silksong:

“They see your peace, driven of faith and toil.”

Nobody has to like poetry, but HK game language is steeped in archaic poetry, grandeur and metaphor.

This is one reason I’ve effectively stopped caring about steam review bombs. People review bomb over the stupidest shit and never change their review if the tiny issue is fixed

It’s not about liking/not liking poetry, it’s about credibility and verisimilitude. When a character says something, is it credible for the character to have said that? A guy walking around in the Harry Potter wizarding world speaking Shakespearean English is not credible, he’s a laughingstock.

I don’t know much about Hollow Knight but from what I can see it is not set in a fantasy Classical Chinese setting. Having characters in the game speak in the Classical Chinese style is not credible. It does not fit the setting, regardless of the broader similarities between Hollow Knight’s setting and Wuxia novels. It’s culturally tone deaf.

FF14 has some of the worst English writing I have ever had the displeasure of suffering through. I started and quit that game like four-six times over the years before finally forcing through to play with friends. I had to look up portions of the original Japanese and translate it myself to get any enjoyment out of the story. I’m not sure about some of the later expansions because it eventually got enjoyable enough that I stopped looking things up, but the latest expansion had me going to the Japanese again, and I cannot understand why they keep deviating from the script in ways that make it worse.

I also quit reading the Witcher series part-way through book four because I just can’t take David French’s writing. The fan translations are much better.

I can only think of one book which was originally in English and translated to Swedish that I found readable. Literally every originally-in-Swedish book I pick up is delightful. Are the people doing the translations just people who failed to write on their own or something?

They speak in a classical style in the games, you have not played them. Theres no need for several paragraphs on this subject from someone that has not played the games. There are plenty of chinese speakers that have, give them a chance to speak.

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.

I have played plenty of other games where characters speak in a classical style. Unless it’s being done to mark the characters as old fashioned (or the world is literally set in medieval times) then it comes off as extremely pretentious.

Edit: I know Hollow Knight is sacred in the indie game community. I’m just saying this is something that annoys many people (including me) who prefer verisimilitude and authenticity.