Silksong's Disastrous Chinese Translation Has Received An Official...

Patch 4 also introduces a range of other fixes and tweaks.

When Silksong arrived in early September it was close to a perfect launch, save one glaring problem: Chinese players quickly cottoned on to some big issues with the Chinese translation, namely that it failed to capture the tone of the Hollow Knight universe. "This isn't about effort, but about taste and direction," an English-to-Chinese translator noted at the time. Another expert noted that its tone resembled "a high-school drama club's Elizabethan improv night."

That sounds pretty bad. As a result, Silksong's Steam rating briefly fell to "mostly negative", and ever since a fan group called Team Cart Fix has been working away in the background to improve the Chinese translation. The fruits of their labour have been available as an unofficial mod for a while, but now, in Silksong's new Patch 4, the work of Team Cart Fix has been officially implemented in the game.

"Their translation builds from elements of the original Silksong translation, retaining existing names for most characters and places, except in instances where the original translation was incorrect, or inconsistent with Hollow Knight," Team Cherry writes. "Most importantly, this is a translation by fans who are well-versed in the (quite dense) narrative and lore of both Hollow Knight games, and understand the subtle links and connections that should be retained in the text."

The problem with Silksong's translation is instructive at a time when AI is decimating large portions of the translation industry. The practice is as much—in fact, often much more—about capturing the spirit of the text as it is about converting raw information. If the first Chinese translation for Silksong resembled "a Wuxia novel instead of conveying the game's [true] tone", as a translator on Omori noted, then it was obviously a dismal failure.

Which makes it fairly easy to see why Silksong's translation might have proven a challenge for the original team: it's very tonally unusual. Understanding the subtleties of the world building and the tenor of the dialogue would be of utmost importance in a translation context. When I spoke to FromSoftware's English translators in 2022, they noted the non-typical tone of the Souls games was a real obstacle: "We do the text, the scripture that we run off first, and then we have to consult him [Hidetaka Miyazaki] to find out what the context is so that we don't make errors. Errors are inevitable, if you don't have context

Source: PC Gamer