Confusable Chinese translationsReport

English：Confusable Chinese translations　·　Other

Kenshi's Chinese translations clash with each other in a lot of places, with one thing carrying two names, one name covering two things, literal readings that reverse the meaning, and typos in the official localisation itself. The table lists 267 of them, in Chinese.

Kenshi's Chinese naming clashes with itself constantly. The same thing turns up under two names, one name covers two different things, a literal reading reverses the meaning, and the official Simplified Chinese localisation carries typos of its own. This page is the English entry point to the table that records 267 of those cases.

The entries come from three places: the conflicts flagged in this site's 606-entry glossary, the gaps found when checking that glossary against the game's official Chinese localisation file (gamedata.po, 5,376 entries), and problems hit while proofreading 777 articles.

If you read Chinese, the full table is at Confusable Chinese translations.

What this is useful for if you do not read Chinese

The one finding that travels across languages is that the official localisation files are not clean. Anyone building Kenshi tooling that consumes gamedata.po or the locale/ translation files should not assume otherwise.

The whole official localisation was unpacked and compared entry by entry: 21,661 entries for Simplified Chinese and 21,727 for Japanese. Of the 233 names that could be matched against this site, 182 had a different Chinese form, but 136 of those were only simplified-versus-traditional character differences. That leaves 46 genuine divergences.

Item names are mostly the official file's to win, since those are the words a player actually sees on screen. Place names are where it goes wrong:

• Shark is rendered with the name of Squin, a different Shek town.
• Fort Simion is rendered as Eyesocket, a slave camp elsewhere on the map.
• Heft, the seat of Emperor Tengu, is replaced by the generic phrase "farming village".
• Black Scratch, the Tech Hunter town, is given the name of a faction, the Southern Hive.
• Wakizashi is spelled with the wrong character.
• The location Cat-Lon's Exile is rendered as though it were a person.
• Swamp Raptor carries a duplicated character.

Those are not matters of translation taste, they are records wired to the wrong object. The rule this site now works to is that the official localisation is authoritative for item names and only a reference for place names.

A further 1,004 official names have no counterpart here. Checking them showed they are internal asset names such as Haircut22_attachment and giraffe type, which no player ever sees, so they are all skipped.

How the table was built

1. Pull every entry from this site's glossary.json (606 records) that is marked as a conflict, carries an alternative translation, or has a note about a mistranslation. That gave 215 entries.
2. Hand them to several agents to sort into real traps, benign variants, and distinctions that should stay separate.
3. Add the cases the glossary never recorded, from the corpus and from domain knowledge, then merge and deduplicate. That gave 267.
4. Run the result over 777 Chinese articles, which corrected 88 places.

Authoritative sources turn out to make mistakes and to contradict each other, so the order of adjudication is: an explicit ruling in this site's glossary, then the argument made in the article itself, then the official localisation, then majority usage across the site.

See also

• Commonly misread game mechanics (confusion at the concept level)
• LogoCat (site creator)
• Disclaimer and Lore Reliability
• Sources and Licensing