Making Silent Hill f Feel Like Home, Just a Very Scary One

Overview

I joined the localization team at Neobards for Silent Hill f and honestly it was one of the wilder projects I've been on. English to Traditional Chinese (and vice versa) across everything: dialogue, UI, GDDs, emails, contracts, internal agreements, social media posts. You name it, I probably translated it.

What I worked on

Pretty much everything text-related: in-game dialogue, UI strings, game design documents, business emails, contracts, internal agreements, and social media posts. Each one needed a different touch. I made sure contracts and internal docs were precise and clean, while the in-game text had to carry that eerie, suffocating atmosphere that Silent Hill is known for. Getting the horror to feel just as unsettling in Traditional Chinese as it does in the original was the fun part.

Working with the team

Being a member of the localization team, we collaborated regularly with the art, programming, and game design teams to keep everything consistent, flagging ambiguities, maintaining the glossary, and making sure localized text actually fit inside the UI without breaking anything. I also handled vendor and internal inquiries along the way.

Interpretation

I also did consecutive and simultaneous interpretation for meetings throughout the project, helping keep English and Chinese-speaking team members on the same page throughout development, which meant a lot of context-switching between very formal contract language and very cursed in-game dialogue. Normal Tuesday stuff.

The tricky bits

The fun part was the in-game text. Silent Hill f is written by Ryukishi07 and the man does not write normal sentences. Everything has this heavy, literary weight to it and making sure that same suffocating dread landed in Traditional Chinese without feeling stiff or over-translated was genuinely challenging in the best way. Horror that reads like a bad translation stops being scary real fast.

Anyway, the game shipped, sold over a million copies on day one, and I got to say I helped make it feel at home in English. Pretty good deal.