Many Chinese players were not impressed with the quality of the translation.
Hollow Knight SIlksong was especially criticized by players from China. This was largely due not to the game itself, but to the problematic localization.
There was too much improvisation in the text, and the sentences differed greatly from the original.
A localization expert described what the launch of Silksong looked like for the Chinese community:
«What players saw on the screen was not the cheerful, lyrical, elegant style that brought the first Hollow Knight such recognition, but a swamp of overloaded archaisms, a self-indulgent carnival of convoluted phrases that more resembled not modern Chinese, but a Qing Dynasty [1644-1912] soap opera, written by someone posing as Shakespeare.
[…] Gamers did not feel immersed in the world of Silksong; they felt trapped in a school drama club, improvising in the style of the Elizabethan era».
In October, Team Cherry introduced beta patch 1.0.28954 for Hollow Knight SIlksong, which aims to fix a number of bugs, and also includes improvements to gamepad support and localization.
The translation of Silksong into Chinese (Simplified) has been redone. The developers intend to improve it, using feedback from testers.
