“No, it’s fine, I didn’t expect the drama to be Chinese.”
Silksong, the sequel to Hollow Knight, is one of the best games of the year or even the decade, allegedly. A DLC turned into a full sequel that became infamous for its many delays, turning r/Silksong into a madhouse and left fans chasing ghosts and ARGs that did not exist. Then Team Cherry confirmed it was coming this year through a Discord message, later officially announced the date which broke the internet and then officially launched in september which broke every online gaming store you can think of. The hype around the game was real and the reviews were incredibly positive.. until they weren’t. The difficulty the game presented generated some discourse since some perceived it as unfair, and this discourse could be visually seen with the Steam ratings. While it first got a raving positive rating, it soon slipped to “Mostly Postive”. By far the most negative reviews came from Chinese players, to a point it dropped to a 38% positive ratings percentage in China, most of them mentioning the horrible Chinese translation. What happened to the translation that made players so mad?
Bragging rights
To start, let’s check the credits of Silksong. Two people were credited for the Chinese translation: Finn Wu and Hertzz Liu. Finn Wu’s identity to this day remains unknown and I won’t engage with the speculation surrounding him. So let’s talk instead about Hertzz Liu, who will comfortably take our protagonist spot.
Hertzz Liu, otherwise known as Hertzz or Hertzzzz, was hired to be the Chinese translator for Silksong. He had previously worked on the Chinese translation of Elder Scrolls Online and now he was a translator for one of the biggest games of the year, so of course he was excited to tell others about his efforts. He did so on the Chinese social media platform Heybox, telling in several posts about several details of Silksong and his process of translating it. The problem? He posted these in June, months before the official announcement of the release date. He was blatantly disregarding NDA just to boast about his efforts, and boast he did. He talked about spoilers in the game, the release date, the translation process (he did it in Google Sheets), and bragged about specific translations he made. In one of his posts, he even said in plain english “Silksong is real”.
However, this being in June when any sign of Silksong life was a short snippet in a Nintendo Direct, pretty much all of these posts went under the radar. These posts would come back to haunt him though.
The Gamescom Demo
A demo for Silksong was playable at Gamescom 2025, which also showcased for the first time the Chinese translation of the game, which quickly spread online through the Chinese fandom and immediately they became worried. These worries came mostly from the Chinese translations for items and cards. A good example would be for Hornet, which I will let a Chinese Steam user explain:
For example, the card "Hornet" has been translated as "名为黄蜂", where “名为” means "named as", and "黄蜂" means wasp, meanwhile "大黄蜂" is the official name of Hornet in Hollow Knight. The lost character "大" is the difference between wasp and hornet in Chinese. And I am quite confused, why all the other cards are named by characters' name, but only hornet's card is translated as "名为黄蜂", or directly translate back to English as "named as wasp"?
As you can see, there was especially confusion because the Chinese translation for Hollow Knight was just fine, so to have mistranslations like these was weird. It didn’t help that the team that was doing Silksong’s translation was different from that of Hollow Knight. The original game had Chinese fantranslation done by a team of eight, but for whatever reason they didn’t return for the next game and Team Cherry handled it inhouse instead with only two translators.
These worries were sent to the developer Team Cherry, but nothing came of it due to the language barrier between fans and Team Cherry. So all that Chinese fans could do was wait for the launch to see how bad it would be.
Fakespearean
When the game finally came out on September 4th, Chinese fans could finally see the totality of the Chinese translation.
And it was bad.
It was really bad. But it wasn't bad in a way you would expect.
Hertz Liu and Finn Wu were clearly talented in writing. They understood Chinese phrasing and had quite a vocabulary. They didn’t just ram the English version through Google Translate and called it a day. However, remember when Hertz bragged about his translations? That same energy could be felt in the translation. Let me show you a clear example. This is dialogue from the english version:
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.
The translators transformed this dialogue into.. this.
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.
Yep, this is real. (Edit: Welp, it isn't. This seems to be a meme by a Chinese fan to make fun of the actual translation, which was interpeted as real by western journalists. It is a really funny meme though and a good example of how Chinese fans felt reading the dialogue)
The Chinese translation turned the mystique and poetic dialogue into the Chinese version of an offtone overwritten Shakespearean play. While this example is one of the worst, the whole game consisted of similar translation problems. Overwritten text, adding details that did not exist in the original and great usage of archaïc language, all making the dialogue feel too oldtimey and widely off-tone.
It wasn’t just the dialogue, it bled into the names and functional text too. One of the most egregious examples was when a textbox saying “Play” was translated to a term meaning “Play a media file”. These kinds of mistranslations then confused players, sometimes to the point that it made them think they needed to solve puzzles that did not exist. All of this, alongside usual translation errors like grammatical mistakes, made the Chinese translation an absolute trashfire.
On a quick side note, the Chinese translation wasn’t the only one which was bad. The French translation for Silksong was very bad too, with the problems this time (allegedly) being an absurd amount of grammatical mistakes. There was a bit of backlash from the French community, but it was relatively muted since they could always use the English version instead. The Chinese fans did not have this luxury, since only a small percentage of them can actually speak English (around 1 to 5 percent). So they were stuck with a translation that at best was very annoying to read and at worst actively made the game worse.
Backlash
The backlash was immediate and intense. The Steam page was getting flooded with negative reviews (some of them being about the difficulty but the majority about the translation), which pushed the aforementioned Steam rating to just mostly positive, and the devs started receiving tons of messages asking them to address the problems. Also the translations were meme gold.
Luckily, this time Team Cherry did respond and vowed to improve the translation. The response to this was positive, as Chinese fans never wanted to blame the developers themselves due to the language barrier. With that sorted, fans then started digging into the actual translators themselves. With Finn Wu being a dead end, it inevitably led them to Hertz, who by now was really regretting boasting about his efforts in the past. People quickly discovered his NDA breaking social media posts, which you can guess sparked even more backlash. What stung even more for fans is that they realised he was also the Chinese translator for Elder Scrolls Online, another infamously bad Chinese translation (in which the title was translated to “Dynamic Granny” and featured other mistranslations that became meme fuel). It wasn’t his first rodeo, he had ruined another game for fans. Calls for his firing started to appear and Hertz started to feel the heat. He began deleting the NDA breaking social media posts and changed his bio to “If you don’t understand, don’t comment.” Not long after, he left social media altogether.
So that was the saga of the Chinese translation. A bafflingly bad translation by a mystery person and a wannabe shakespearean with a Hu Tao pfp. Team Cherry had heard the backlash and went on to fix the translation. Right?
The second translation: It’s worse
In mid-October, they launched the beta version of the new Chinese translation. This translation was done by.. unknown. Yeah we don’t know who did this translation. Maybe they stayed anonymous out of embarrassment, because this second translation was even worse than the first.
This time, according to Chinese Steam users, there were more grammatical errors, missing lines and mistranslations that made it clear the translators didn’t know what they were reading. In fact, instead of changing the Shakespearean dialogue, they doubled down till it turned into gibberish that is impossible to get English examples of. The translation was so bad that Chinese players had a hard time even understanding the story. The Steam post announcing this new translation was quickly taken down due to it being flooded with more angry Chinese fans.
With the first translation creating a trashfire, the second translation being even worse, it seemed that Team Cherry threw in the towel, as they announced a few weeks later that they would be implementing a Chinese fan translation made by Team Cart Fix. The fact that Chinese fans had suggested using fans for the translation even before the game launched makes you question why they didn’t do this in the first place.
Outro
With the fan translation being received well, Chinese Steam reviews going into the positive again and Hertz vanishing from the internet, it seems this drama finally is coming to an end. For real this time. The aforementioned French translation is still very bad with no updates since release, but calls to improve it are few and far between. I believe it will be eventually fixed, but time will only tell.
To end this post, I wanna highlight some of the excellent sources which I recommend checking out:
- Silksong’s Real Final Boss of the Loekalization blog is a really good blogpost that goes deeper into several aspects of the discourse (although some of the details might be inacurate, so be aware of that)
- A Curious Case of Game Translation by Agent Dorman discusses the translation from a Chinese perspective and goes deeper into the translation nuances than I ever could
- The Poor Fakespearan Translation of Silksong by Archive Of Easteros also discusses the translation from a Chinese perspective
- Lastly, I want to thank /u/Tokyono and /u/cryptidspines for their hobby scuffles alongside /u/ChaosFlameEmber for recommending them!
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I want to politely clarify that the "no mind to think" example is, as far as I can tell, not real. It's made up, a meme. It was spread by the blog post you linked as an actual example of mistranslation from the game, and echoed by credulous games journalists who thought its writer was an expert -- especially since Silksong was only days old and most hadn't finished it -- but the "no mind to think" monologue is from the first Hollow Knight, and doesn't appear in Silksong. I think the misinformation comes from memes like this one made by Chinese players to mock the translation in an easily understandable way to people who played the original. A much better example for a factual post might be the opening poem and its translation.
Damn, and I had part of it in the title. I have now made an edit clarifying it being fake, so thank you for pointing that out.
It really just sucks how this entire drama is hard to explain because of the language barrier, which means tons of the nuances are lost and needs to be explained by secondary sources. The blog post I linked is pretty good at explaining some of them, which is why every other article links back to this one, but also has a lot of questionable parts. Not only is the quote they used wrong, they have a whole section about Finn Wu which is very speculative. Not to mention, in the comments he defends his usage of AI so the article might be partially written with AI.
It is such an interesting drama but it is hampered by the language barrier and misinformation.
Thank you for the correction! I'm in community for a couple Chinese-developed gacha games and while it's not quite 1:1 it's always interesting to see the odd and distorted way information, discourse and memes filter between the Chinese and Global communities. Between the language barrier and the great firewall, communication is sparse, often agenda-laden and misunderstood. It happens! The journalists involved who repeated the blogger's misinformation -- one calling then a "translation expert" -- are really at fault here, and should have done the same basic due diligence that I did
I feel the need to apologize since I did link to that article, but didn't clarify some stuff lol.
My understanding was that the Eng translation of the CN translation of the "No mind to think" monologue was a recreation using HK dialogue in place of Skong dialogue to avoid spoiling people. There was a really strong anti-spoiler culture during the lead up to Skong, even trailers were seen as spoilers, so I could see why CN fans did it that way to illustrate their problems to the rest of the community. But my overall impression was that it was an accurate recreation of the problems, or as good a recreation as the fans could make at the time.
Buuut... I can't verify that (currently anyway lol). I can however cite from memory the problems that CN reviewers and discussions kept citing. Namely:
the weird archaic language that also reads like it's written by a high schooler attempting ancient chinese
terms from Hollow Knight are named/used differently in Silksong because neither of the translation teams seem to have played Hollow Knight
(exclusive to first translation) despite very obviously not having played Hollow Knight, put in a lot of personal interpretation and feelings.
(exclusive to second translation) the names were changed AGAIN ~6 weeks after Skong released, so guides and resources were already pushed out by CN players by then.
Hope this clears stuff up. And again apologies for not clarifying this stuff in the scuffles comment lol.
I see, that is interesting!
I looked it up and even on a quick Chinese search the only example I could find of the poor translation was what I assume to have been an earlier form of the meme you linked.
As someone interested in this topic in general, do you have some links to actual cases of the poor translation?
The two other sources, the videos linked in the OP, are from Chinese players and contain actual examples from the game. I don't have anything else directly to hand.
This sounds like when the nutty Swede took it upon himself to rewrite lord of the rings and call it a translation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/16lv1z5/literature_the_terrible_swedish_translation_of/
It’s a wild story. It’s so absurd. Every time I think of it I have a hard time believing it’s real. But it is.
My mental go to for bad translation stories is the person who "translated" thousands of pages into Scots Wikipedia but all they did was write it in a Scottish accent
That is hilarious
Here's the r/Scotland post about it
That explains so much.
It's got a Hobby Drama writeup too.
In the late 1800s Sir Richard Francis Burton undertook the first unabridged translation of the longest version of Arabian Nights (there are multiple manuscripts, and the oldest ones do not have a full 1,001 stories, but this one does). It's fairly true to the spirit of the original, but Burton thought contemporary English lacked the timeless majesty the tales required, so he invented a very bizarre and idiomatic dialect that freely mixed Victorian slang, Elizabethan English, and archaisms from the Middle Ages.It was immediately banned from print for obscenity. (There's a lot of sex even in the original, and most of Burton voluminous endnotes were graphically preoccupied with comparing Arabian and Victorian sexual mores.)
It's been alternately praised as a work of genius (Borges thought it was a masterpiece of English literature), or as the deranged work of an intellectually narcissistic kinkster.
I read it and had a good time.
In summary, I pity the Chinese gamers, but I'm glad there's somebody brave/insane enough and so artistically uncompromising in the face of all logic or reality that we get this entertainment.
Wait, so did Burton add even more sex to it or something? Was what was there not enough for him? Unabridged translations of 1001 Arabian Nights actually exist?
I myself have only read an abridged version of Burton, and it's the only Arabian Nights I've read, and while it's my understanding that he added his own flair, I don't think he changed that much content.
I believe most of the sexual content he added was as supplemental notes. There's a 14,000-word essay inserted into one volume just about pederasty and male homosexuality in Arabia.
That's a complicated question. The original manuscripts of the Nights are pretty short, and there's lots of unabridged translations of those. However, the stories' popularity led people to look for "complete" versions with a full 1,001 different stories. By the late 1800s such a version exists, but its "authenticity" is suspect because some tales, like the very popular "Aladdin," seem to have been invented by Europeans to fill out the Nights, made their way back into Arabic to be inserted into the manuscript, then been translated back into European languages as part of the "complete" edition.
Anyway, the Egyptian manuscript, which is the longest, does have 1,001 stories, and I think the only unabridged translation of that version is still Burton's. But even then it's near impossible to buy a full, unabridged translation because it's 17 volumes and thousands of pages. It's only been printed completely a few times.
Borges' essay on the various translations of One Thousand and One Nights is very worth a read even for those who haven't read One Thousand and One Nights itself, partially just because of the incredible picture it paints of Burton himself as a guy. Burton as Borges describes him is a masterful translator, yes, but also a man uniquely deranged about sex and about race in a way that you really only get from Victorian men who fancied themselves as explorers. The thing that makes Burton interesting, though, is that he's very capable and very willing to back up these reputations, both the one of an explorer and the one of a man uniquely able to fill out the gaps left out by the previous translator, an unrepetent prude called Lane. Borges describes Burton's extensive footnotes thusly:
I can't help but be reminded of the 1901 Icelandic "translation" of Stoker's Dracula that was really a different story.
What’s the story there?
Well, it’s not Dracula.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Basically, the person who “translated” Dracula to Icelandic based their work on a Swedish “translation” that had also changed elements of the story. So this Icelandic work, Powers of Darkness, is more of a rewrite than a translation. The Wiki page discusses some of the differences#Differences_between_Dracula_and_Makt_Myrkranna) between Dracula and Powers of Darkness, including but not limited to: abridging the work as a whole, so most of it is based around Harker’s time in Transylvania; changing every character name except for Dracula; and, to quote directly from the article:
"Harker has an obsession with breasts as he speaks frequently of the 'bosom' of various women he encounters in Transylvania."
There’s a lot going on.
Oh hai a post I wrote! Also thanks to Op for mentioning me. Even if I didn’t do much lol.
It’s a great post. I also listened to a Swedish podcast about it. Its so absurd
The interesting thing is that Ohlmarks is clearly on some level a competent writer, but a terrible translator. So there is the wierd case that he kept doing translations. (or stuff adjacent to translations, like transcribing ancient texts)
Oh hey, drama I was vaguely aware of!
I haven't played the game in German, but just looking over area names, they're not great. Almost all of them are just taking the English words and translating them, which is clunky at the best of times, plus even in those there's mistakes, like Wisp Thicket having Wisp translated as a wisp of fur ("Büscheldickicht"), Shellwood having Shell translated as a seashell ("Muschelwald"), or Blasted Steps leaving behind both the "damned" and "sandblasted" meanings and instead calling it the exploded steps ("Gesprengte Stufen").
Not sure how the actual dialogue is, so maybe that part's great, but just these broad strokes make me glad I played in English
Lmao Muschelwald is terrible
I mean even as someone who doesn't speak a lick of the language, I see that word and go "Muschel- like mussel? Ain't that a seashell or a mollusk? That can't be right." Some of these translation foibles really confuse me, they seem so... obviously incorrect?
Would Schalewald make sense?
It dos make more sense, but while "Schale" is used to refer to the outside layer of eggs, crustaceans, fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc., it's not really used for bugs. It would feel like a less severe case of going with a word that sounds similar rather than translating the meaning accurately.
When it comes to bug (and bug-adjacent) shells the most accurate translation would be "Panzer" (for the hard exoskeleton of something like a beetle), "Gehäuse" (for something like a cocoon or snail shell), or most broadly but least intuitively "Hülle" for any kind of exoskeleton or outer shell.
"Panzerwald" sounds aesthetically the nicest to me but because "Panzer" also means "tank" and "armor" it takes on a kind of martial connotation that isn't really present in the original.
"Gehäusewald" sounds IMO the worst but it has the most clear-cut insect/snail meaning.
"Hüllenwald" is kinda inbetween sound wise but it has the most tenuous connection to bug shells. However, it is the same word you'd use for translating "empty shell" which is a recurring thing in the Hollow Knight / Silksong setting, so it has that going for it at least.
Sorry, this is probably a lot more in-depth than you needed, but it was interesting to think about.
No that was all super interesting, thanks! I feel like people assume translation is straightforward when it's often not.
Yeah, translating just the literal meaning is comparatively simple, but doing so while matching the tone, style, and connotations of the original can be really challenging. I recently read Pratchett's The Last Continent in German on a whim and while I do not envy the guy who had to try to translate and localize a book that's a very thinly veiled parody of Australian customs and slang, most of it survived the process about as well as leftover lasagna in my fridge on a drunk Friday night.
That's a great answer. I can read some german, but coming up with how insect-related terminology vibes to a native speaker... yeah, no.
Side note: "sprengen" in Relation to sandblasting is a real term. "Gesprengte Stufen" does mean exactly what (sand)blasted steps would, although the term is mostly within the jargon of the craft.
Huh, good to know! Definitely feels like it's less common of a meaning vs. blasted in English, at least I didn't know it meant that in German too lol
Small error but "Die Mark" instead of "Das (Rücken-)Mark". Hornet should really exchange those to Euros soon
German translation also messed up the gendered article for The Marrow, making it sound like our old currency.
I think this one I actually kinda like if it was intentional bc it's actually sort of a pun. Same word for marrow but it's a name for a type of place bc of the gendered article.
Should've just been "Die Knochenmark" to bring the pun home, imo
They also turned „Sinner‘s Road“ into „Sinroad“, for example. It‘s bad.
I was big into the Skong thing in the lead up to release and it’s blowing my mind that there was a Chinese guy just breaking NDAs while we were shitposting
Right? People were on the brink of a psych ward and that guy was casually dropping leaks just like that for no one to see.
As a native Chinese speaker I had to look up the original translation, and found a Chinese version here ,
sane translation above, and the Hertzz translation below.Edit: As another poster has noted, this is not the actual Hertzz translation, but a re-imagining of the original Hollow Knight intro in a similar style.
I'd say that the reverse translation given in the main writeup is mostly accurate in terms of tone.
The original Hertzz translation also included many unjustified references to Buddhist theology and usage of archaic phraseology which the reverse-translator rendered as Early Modern English.
Everyone loves a translation that's more clever than the original, but he could only land on pretentious.
As a Chinese person with a limited understanding of written Chinese, the bottom translation really is quite something with all the references that I cannot understand. It's so much longer than the other one as well
Same here. The poem is basically something you’d find in a temple with a free flow of mushrooms.
I say this as a Chinese person who is basically illiterate in written Chinese, and whose spoken Chinese ability is at best 30 years outdated, but my parents did make me memorize a bunch of Tang dynasty poetry: that og translation slaps, actually.
Your link 403 for me :(
Mirrored here https://i.imgur.com/ZgoxyRv.png
As top comment mentions though, it's not an actual translation, just a fan-made reimagining of a similarly toned translation.
thanks
What was this hertz dude smoking? By just the no mind to think quote being... whatever that was, you'd at least attempt to make it decently faithful. Yes, team cherry had no idea it was bad, but it also seems like they didn't research who their translators were
TBH it's not the first time a translator has done something like that, one of the translations for Final Fantasy Tactics famously.
Eveeything i have learn about team cherry i dicates they like developing games and find everything else bothersome
That quote is from the first game and doesn’t appear anywhere in Silksong. It was apparently written as a joke to highlight the absurdity of the first Silksong translation, but it isn’t actually a real quote from said translation.
They were apparently the same people who translated Stardew Valley to Chinese, which was also initially received very poorly
What a bummer that they couldn't work something out with the fans who translated HK.
I looked it up out of couriosity and: That's "big". Which is accurate, lol.
And thanks for mentioning me!
That Loekalization source is written kinda weirdly? There’s some stuff about AI on their website and chunks of this + other articles feel like they’re ai-generated
They've changed it now, but the image at the start of the article used to be an AI art of Hornet saying the mistranslated line to a bunch of Studio Ghibli style children, which a lot of people complained about in the comments.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that!
I laughed at this bit... complaining about the flowery, difficult language when they're writing the exact same way. The weird AI article is just as obnoxious.
One time I will collect my marbles and tell you the story of the Russian Harry Potter translations. This story give me same vibe.
Please do
does it make my immoertal look like Shakespeare?
Oh no, for one thing, they took very literal JKR's names and translated them *very very literally*. And there were other shenanigans, like last books were bathing in money, so the whole teams of the most priced language specialists worked on it. Resulting in stylistically unsynchronised chapters. And so on and so on.
More cursed than HP is only Dune, but that's a story Jedi not tell you, it's a doctorate worthy write up.
Хуже Дюны тоже есть, один из переводов Танцоров На Краю Времени Муркока и печальный вздох Дракон Возрожденный (3я книга Колеса Времени). Если ты увидишь Эти Главы в "Возрожденном драконе", ты умрёшь, даже не зная оригинал.
"Severus Snouw"...
I really hope they paid the fan translation team after giving two fucked up translations that they 100% paid for
This was a good read, I know 0 about Hollow Knight but it was still interesting. Thanks for the post
ARGs, not ARPGs. Very different lol
So apparently Dynamic Granny or 动感婆婆 is a mistranslation of Elixir of Vitality from ESO.
I don't know how that happened...
Elder Scrolls was originally mistranslated to 老头滚动条 which when translated back to English means an Old Person's Scroll Bar. It stuck with the Chinese playerbase so now ESO is affectionately known as 老滚OL or Old Roll Online.
Also found out Neverwinter Nights (or A Night Without Winter in the Chinese version, which in and of itself is another translation error cause Neverwinter is a location) also had a maternal grandparent mistranslation where the saying "Kick in my Teeth" was translated to "Teeth Kicking Granny" or 踢牙老奶奶. It's now used to refer to translation errors found in video games.
So just like "overmind" in Russian
This translation drama serves as a humorous reminder that Team Cherry is, in fact, still an indie developer. Great write-up!
Now my throat hurts from laughing so hard at “Dynamic Granny.”
I feel bad for Team Cherry here. It sounds like they were doing everything in good faith, hiring professional translators with a track record of other games, but not having any knowledge of how to vet their work in languages they don’t speak.
If I were hiring a translator, and could hire a guy that did a big game like Elder Scrolls Online, I’d have probably felt safe using someone that had been verified by a big publisher (which is apparently not true).
I would have probably sought the opinion of someone who has played the chinese translation first...
Is that one notably bad?
yeah, i don't know, I can't really excuse the second go around which somehow got worse
It's pretty common with these "high budget indie games" like Supergiant's Hades or this Silksong to completely fail to deliver translations and instead end up relying on fans. I get that it's a lot of budget and work for relatively little profit but... I dunno.
Part of the issue is that many of these indie developers don't even have contacts with reputable localization studios who would be willing to take on a risky project from a small (even if well-respected) team. The best you'll get is a developer posting "hey, does anyone know any good Italian translators?" in one of the 15 game dev Discords they're in, and then realizing that they can only pick 2 of "good, fast, affordable" when it comes to translations — if they're lucky enough to even be able to tell who's good. And then 8 months later they repeat the process with "hey, does anyone know any good Italian proofreaders/quality checkers?"
Compnaies usually have a team dedicated for this type of stuff but infie developers dont have such a department
Usually localization comes hand in hand with Publishing companies so self-published games have the luxury of being about to ignore the issue.
It's pretty common for high budget companies period, too.
The Total War series now only dub the game in English. Same with the Oblivion remake, etc...
That's why Toby Fox is the goat
Toby fox is a turboweeb who only translates UTDR to japanese and leaves the rest of the world to make fan translations. These fan translations are usually rushed by fandom teenagers instead of being written by a professional team.
Dunno why you got down voted lol
Their attitude sucks is why. Calling someone a turboweed because they refuse to translate a game to your language is typical shitty gamer behavior. Sorry, developers aren't obligated to translate to every language in existence if they don't wanna.
And throwing young fans under the bus shows that they rather piss and moan about bad translations instead of doing anything else to solve the problem. They're just another lazy gamer whining about how the world won't bend to their whims when they could do anything else to fix the issue.
That is not at all how I read the tone of the comment lol
They're just explaining that the Japanese translation is an outlier and the other translations of his works aren't as consistently high-quality. The "turboweeb" is teasing, not an insult (have you played Undertale and seen Alphys' character? Toby is clearly self-aware), and the rest of the comment isn't assigning any negative judgment to Toby at all.
And that's not the way I've read it either. See, funny thing about reading shit over the internet is tone varies between people. What you see as poking fun is what I see is the entitled gamer being pissy that someone won't translate in their language. And them irriated at young fans doing dumb things.
I have played Undertale and Alphys has nothing to do with entitlement of gamers, who have literally posted on release day of a small indie game asking for a translation of their langauge. Some of them get pissy when someone gently suggests that they learn a language to play a game. These people think it's just lazyness on the dev's part for not hiring a translation team, not that it requires actual work with both developer and translation team figuring out how to rewrite the script, adapt puns, and change questionable/inappropriate content for the source market. And you can still mess up majorly like op's post did if you don't know what you're doing.
I think it's great that we're pushing for more translations and releasing more games everywhere instead of refusing to release them at all. I don't care for the weird entitlement of gamers that think all games can be translated to their langauge and badmouth devs for not catering to them.
I get why "turboweeb" comes off wrong (it 100% read as needlessly abrasive to me, like "where tf did that come from??") but if it's true that it's not meant as an insult, then the rest reads entirely differently. For all I know, it could be just... entirely literal prose. Doesn't need to be insulting when it's true that, as you acknowledge, translation is hard, and well-meaning fans who just don't have the right resources may be all he can afford.
Your tone doesn't really read as much better, ironically. I don't think such heavy accusations were needed after being given an alternative explanation that could be right just as easily as wrong. Dismissing the Alphys point (which, from what I do know about Toby Fox, entirely checks out) without actually addressing why it wouldn't apply doesn't help, either.
Yo this reminds me of an iver 2 decade old drama with the Fellowship of the Ring DVD release, I think in Japan? The English subtitles were bad and there were screenshots of it. I remember one of them had Frodo saying "Use you brain to think" and that sentence has lived rent free in my head ever since.
As a fan of both skong and Elder Scrolls Online I’m incredibly amused that they both used the same terrible translator. It’s more excusable for Team Cherry because they’re so small, but ZOS (ESO’s developer) has been bungling things for quite a while so I can’t say I’m surprised. They even have their own recent translation drama, the most recent DLC is still missing a promised translation to French, which all the other DLCs have had. As a larger studio I can’t cut them as much slack, but they did have absolutely brutal layoffs recently courtesy of Microsoft, so I’m sure they’re not operating at their best either.
i do chn->eng translations (both professionally and as a fan) and have toyed with eng->chn although it's not my specialty, so this is right up my alley even if i've never engaged with the hollow knight games in any way, shape, or form.
i cannot fathom that hertzz BROKE NDA and the company still kept him on. it does seem like he posted it on heybox so maybe no one in the company was on heybox? but still, no one else reported him to the company for breaking NDA? side note, but according to the heybox post (in the blogpost you linked), he was on the TL team for where winds meet (燕云十六声) as well, and i've been told by my friends that the localization isn't the best. i play in chn so i'm not sure what exactly is off, but maybe i'll go check it out now ;P
honestly, i try to give translators/localizers a good amount of grace because it's a difficult job, especially with fantastical/historical terms and contexts, but i would expect much, much better from professionals. he mentions in the heybox post that he was an english major and had been in the video game translation industry for several years, so it's insane to me that he didn't learn anything.
in particular, when you mentioned that hornet's name was 名为黄蜂, my first thought was AI or machine translation, as if he plugged in "this character is named hornet" and accidentally copied too many characters LOL. i have this thought again with the "play (game)" vs "play (media)" thing that you mentioned later. it really seems to me like the translators were either not fluent in chinese or english (as seen from the incorrect context for many terms) or used MTL and just... didn't bother to check? unprofessional either way.
i will say, though, after watching the second video you sent (third link), the "fakespearean" style of the descriptions doesn't bother me too much. it seems to fit the setting in general, although it is quite a bit wordier than necessary. i personally disagree with the pushback regarding the "wuxia-like" style, because to me, it seems like hollow knight is of the fantastical adventure genre anyway, which also includes wuxia.
that all said, according to the first video you sent (second link), the translations jump around in tone. i don't have an issue with "moss cave" but i agree with agent dorman's point that the description, which included the term 发呆 for 'spacing out', was too casual and slangy, which didn't fit the rest of the "fakespearean" texts. i also realized at 7:56 in the same video that the line written in "fakespearean" is supposed to be dialogue, which is definitely smth to criticize imo. dialogue isn't supposed to be clunky unless it fits the setting, but it certainly doesn't seem to fit here. my previous opinion on it mostly stems from me not knowing the game tbh.
i hope this wasn't too rambly or condescending or anything (it's late and i'm really tired + i generally try not to comment on things that i don't know the context of but it's rare to come across a niche-ish topic that i can talk about!), but i hope this might have been enlightening?
as an aside: fan translators truly run the world. i've seen some really bad fan TLs, whether it's due to lack of knowledge of either language, lack of writing skills, or just plugging the raws through a machine and getting some wacko garbage. but i've also seen lots of amazing, properly-researched, passionate fan TLs, although many times they don't get the credit they deserve. i often see eng fans jumping on whatever TL is available, even if it may be a bad-quality one, and praising it endlessly, and it makes me really sad as a fan TLer who tries my best to make sure i represent the context, writing style, etc accurately. but that's just my personal opinion, as all of this is lol.
Gonna put in my two cents, but from personal experience, localisation has been worse and worse across the years. HK translation was fine. Silksong, as you mentionned, was terrible, but I feel like more and more studios aren't really making an effort to localize. I heard about the recent Anno controversy which, as a game developped in Germany, has a shitty German localisation. There has been game series that declined across the years (like Stellaris localisation, from Paradox, is a heap of trash, for instance even worse than EU4 that was mediocre to start with) to the point that if it's not from someone like CD red or Callypso or Nintendo (to a lesser degree, I miss when they did more french VA), I dread the localisation nowadays.
🤓 uhm ackshually, you can’t have “many delays” if you never set a date in the first place.
It's just so easy to get people to take up pitchforks about translation though. Violating an NDA and bragging in your blog is Not Cool but other than that in my opinion it's just another "how DARE they take liberties with the sacred text that is my bug game!" thing. I'm playing Silksong and loving it but from where I stand the English text is also arguably purple.
Hahaha so basically he made them all sound like Final Fantasy 14 characters.
wait wait wait wait wait.
Google SHEETS??
Yeah, spreadsheets are a pretty normal part of the workflow for translations. You can have both the original line and the translation visible at the same time, notes for context, and set it up so that the background color changes to alert you if a line is too long and needs to be shortened/altered before being put in the game.
y'know what, did not think about cell width being helpful along with the conditional formatting rules.
it still sounds unwieldy from my lack of experience for sure (especiallu with how I use spreadsheets in my day to day) but I appreciate the explanation regardless
If i were a betting man, I'd place 80/20 odds that they attempted to use AI for the second translation. Maybe the first was even AI assisted too.
Like
>Choose language="English" -> "Chinese"
>Choose style= "Overwrought Shakespeare"
Kinda reminds me of how Lobotomy Corp's EN TL was basically a scam or the devs, or Hades' devs (allegedly) didn't pay the translators and crowdsourced it.
This pairs nicely with the early coverage of Silksong’s surprise release date reveal, where Team Cherry were like “oh, we’ve just been off in our own world working on making a fun game :D”. And then you get things like this, and decent size sequences of the game having to be reworked because they didn’t realize you have some 30+minute run backs.
And I’m just like “bet you would’ve caught a ton of these if you’d just done more playtesting or released a demo”
... There is no part of the game that ever had a 30+ minute runback, the longest runbacks are more like 30 seconds.
And they've never shortened any of the runbacks either, just made one slightly easier by removing an enemy.
What are you talking about?