this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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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.
I'm not sure what that screenshot is supposed to be directly comparing, you'll have to ask that commenter.
The difference in the Chinese characters and words themselves is that the Silksong words are more complex, like using "无"(without) rather than the simple negative "no", even "台"(platform) has a dozen different meanings depending on the context. The HK characters more concretely refer to single or limited actions and objects, while the Silksong characters are more complex and dynamically significant, depending on a lot of context to discern any specificity.
If all of Silksong is translated like that, it indicates the Chinese translators have focused on translating the overall shadowy, legendary, poetic atmosphere of the game throughout the descriptions and dialogue linguistically, which is contrary to the brief, down-to-earth descriptions and dialogue of much of the English source text. It seems like an artistic choice by the translators, but apparently not one that is resonating with some of the Chinese-speaking audience.
the so called "artistic choice" by the translators clearly diverges from the original writer's artistic choices in a way that audiences perceive it as negative
Could be!
Lofty, broad poetry is the HK games bread and butter, but now I'm looking forward to playing the Chinese version after I finish my English game, or at least directly comparing the texts.
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
They're already overjoyed, what's one more piece of good news?