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Hollow Knight: Silksong sinks to 'Mixed' Steam review status among Chinese gamers over its bafflingly bad translation, with Team Cherry promising to improve it (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 2 days ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca

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[–] ook@discuss.tchncs.de 96 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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.

source

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 1 points 9 hours ago

We got jabronis who leave bad reviews because games are woke.

[–] stray@pawb.social 11 points 1 day ago

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?