Hollow Knight: Silksong sinks to 'Mixed' Steam review status among Chinese gamers over its bafflingly bad translation, with Team Cherry promising to improve it
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Update: Hollow Knight: Silksong sinks to 'Mostly Negative' Steam review status among Chinese gamers over its bafflingly bad translation, with Team Cherry promising to improve it
The extent of the issues makes it sound like a tall order.
PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
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
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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.
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.
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Probably excusable when neither one of the devs speak the language. They probably trusted whoever did the translation and that’s that. Seems like an easy fix though.
I am just curious how bad it could be that you would write a negative review about it. I’ve seen some pretty bad translations in my language, but it never made the game unplayable. I guess difficult to convey when you are not a Chinese speaker, the article examples don’t mean much to me.
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?
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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.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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.
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Update: Hollow Knight: Silksong sinks to 'Mostly Negative' Steam review status among Chinese gamers over its bafflingly bad translation, with Team Cherry promising to improve it
The extent of the issues makes it sound like a tall order.
PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com)
Did they use ai or something?
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One of the characters says „and btw Taiwan is a sovereign nation“
Not a bug/won’t fix
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I guess gone are the days when we laughed at bad localization and enjoyed the game anyway.
I get feeling let down about the localization, but to review bomb over it does feel particularly fragile, even for gamers.
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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.
HK games are not set in China, but they are both firmly set in a medieval fantasy world, with knights, legends, superpowers and archaic language.
There is not much to ridicule about the literary poetry of Hollow Knight or Silksong; the mystery and grand imagery in their official description and dialogue is central to their overall historical fantasy worldbuilding.
Regarding Harry Potter, a very different modern urban fantasy setting, a Silksong phrase like “They forget your heart, bound in slumber and servitude” would be out of place(could be a Goblet of Fire clue). That phrase, however, fits squarely and properly into the medieval fantasy setting of Hollow Knight and Silksong. Both HK games are set among the ruins of a legendary, vaunted kingdom, where chivalry and remnants of castle courtesy live on.
The dramatic, archaic poetry present in HK and Silksong is a natural aspect of the game’s dramatic, archaic setting.
I am curious about the Chinese translations directly compared to the original English and how the official HK English compares to the official Silksong English.
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One of the characters says „and btw Taiwan is a sovereign nation“
Please tell me this is true
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I was mainly thinking of the NES days. “I feel asleep!” “I am Error.” “Someone set up us the bomb.” “A winner is you!”
all your base are belongs to us
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HK games are not set in China, but they are both firmly set in a medieval fantasy world, with knights, legends, superpowers and archaic language.
There is not much to ridicule about the literary poetry of Hollow Knight or Silksong; the mystery and grand imagery in their official description and dialogue is central to their overall historical fantasy worldbuilding.
Regarding Harry Potter, a very different modern urban fantasy setting, a Silksong phrase like “They forget your heart, bound in slumber and servitude” would be out of place(could be a Goblet of Fire clue). That phrase, however, fits squarely and properly into the medieval fantasy setting of Hollow Knight and Silksong. Both HK games are set among the ruins of a legendary, vaunted kingdom, where chivalry and remnants of castle courtesy live on.
The dramatic, archaic poetry present in HK and Silksong is a natural aspect of the game’s dramatic, archaic setting.
I am curious about the Chinese translations directly compared to the original English and how the official HK English compares to the official Silksong English.
HK games are not set in China, but they are both firmly set in a medieval fantasy world
??!
I guess we have completely different ideas of the word medieval. This to me looks like a completely separate, unique fantasy world with no resemblance whatsoever to a historical medieval setting of the sort that games like D&D are based on.
It’s fine if they have created this wonderful unique setting of their own, but then it leaves me with the question of how the language aspects of medieval society ended up there despite all the other differences. I mean these characters don’t even resemble humans!
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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
Why can’t they speak freedom language? 🇺🇲
🇺🇲 we’re here to fuck up democracy and act like the center of the world, and we’re out of democracy 🇺🇲Would be fun if Lemmy had a feature to block people / instances by country, now that I think of it
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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.
What’s the difference between the “Hollow Knight” and “Silksong” versions mentioned above? Clearly the Silksong Chinese text is longer. Also the retranslated English text is missing the core points from the original English text.
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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
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.
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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.
It’s great to hear from a trusted authority that the translation is perfect. I’m sure the Chinese will be happy to hear that their concerns are baseless
