Hollow Knight: Silksong sinks to 'Mixed' Steam review status among Chinese gamers over its bafflingly bad translation, with Team Cherry promising to improve it
Hollow Knight: Silksong sinks to 'Mixed' Steam review status among Chinese gamers over its bafflingly bad translation, with Team Cherry promising to improve it
Things feeling overly flowery. Wuxia-style or even nonsensical, clearly show that tone matters as much as accuracy in localization. Let’s hope the upcoming fixes restore the game’s intended mood and readability for all players.
One of the characters says „and btw Taiwan is a sovereign nation“
i would be mad too if my videogame had western oligarch talking points yeah.
Please tell me this is true
Based
Devotion is a great game!
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.
I think translations should involve a pair of people where both know both languages but one is fluent in the one while the other is fluent in the other. Or a single person fluent in both, but if you don't know the other language, it can be hard to verify that fluency and I'm sure it's not very hard to find people willing to lie about their proficiency to get a job.
it's not like the cartridge age and they're burying them in the new mexico desert or something
The main complaint seems to be that it is translated like a wuxia novel, which is incorrectly stated to be against the tone of the game.
Wuxia describes very near exactly the tone of Hollow Knight games: a lone, chivalrous but low-born warrior wandering the land fighting their way through a mythical world of bad guys, following legends and righting wrongs while journeying toward the ultimate prize/destination.
Coupled with zero examples of "bad translations", I'd take this article with a shaker of salt.
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.
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 guess gone are the days when we laughed at bad localization and enjoyed the game anyway.
Somebody set up us the review bomb.
All your reviews are belong to us. You have no chance to positive. Make your time.
I get feeling let down about the localization, but to review bomb over it does feel particularly fragile, even for gamers.
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.
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.
It’s insane, here’s the translation back to English:
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.
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.
We got jabronis who leave bad reviews because games are woke.
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?
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
Poor translation seems like a pretty fair reason to me tbh, steam now groups reviews by language too
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'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.
Too often I have bought a game that was reviewed as overwhelmingly positive and it turned out to be some boring ass niche game.
Ironically, this is how I feel about Hollow Knight lol
Yep, this is caused because people flood in from their little discord server where everyone has crawled up the dev's ass. Once you learn to recognize this you'll never be able to unsee it.
For me, it's massive shitpost in reviews which I just want to know if the game is good. The worst thing is their often so unfunny and wish there's a way to filter out those reviews (which is using it loosely)
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.
there's a setting for that now, i think the default is yes.
That only impacts the reviews if you want to actually read them the total reviews are not filtered.
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
The headline is either confusing or a touch clickbaity. It's mixed for Chinese language reviews specifically. The overall (and the English reviews, too) are at Very Positive.
But hey, fair, they messed up with the localization and apparently some bits of the launch. It's gonna get you on the user reviews.
I mean even in english the text is cryptic af. Maybe they’re upset it’s intentionally hard to understand
You know how bad things are when I searched for some examples and the first result is a localization mod.
Did they use ai or something?
A good translation of a game with only like 50 pages of text. They could bust out a passable translation within a week. How long would a great one take? Like two, three weeks to write?
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.
My father used to translate books and managed about a page per hour with an editor to offer notes. I stand by 2-3 weeks to manually translate 50 pages of dialogue and exposition to a great, shippable quality. It’s more difficult when the subject matter is this disjointed, but I don’t imagine it would slow someone down by more than 4x. Particularly if there are notes on tone and premise available.
Well, you do need to hire someone, get them set up with access to the text database and then you need to implement the updated lines in-game and test and then bug fix anything that breaks anything, presumably. And then make the patch, submit it and have it go live, although for China presumably that'd be Steam-specific and have no actual first party approval process?
I thought stream updated policies so that this time of foreign review bombing wouldn't be as apparent? (Reviews in your specific region counting)
Edit: they did. Still is very positive for everyone else
If they have a legitimate complaint (bad translation), it's not review bombing
Though it's not really relevant to anyone not speaking that language, even if it's not review bombing.
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.
Oh that's was a default steam change (for the better)
Got tired of seeing random Chinese bullshit review bombing because a non-foreign specific game didn't give enough glory to the CCP and china to appease nationalists