Game Developer: Nintendo has failed to credit external translators who worked on major first-party games

Games industry website Game Developer has produced an investigative report on Nintendo which reveals that external translators, who have worked on major key Nintendo franchises, have been refused credits and locked into decade-long NDAs by Nintendo. The site has spoken to multiple translators, who wish to remain anonymous, who state that the Kyoto-based company has failed to credit them multiple times on franchises ranging from The Legend of Zelda to Animal Crossing, for their work which has taken months to translate. It seems that Nintendo has issue crediting external contractors and not those who work internally at Nintendo. Two translation companies, which work on Nintendo projects, but seem to be be ignored by Nintendo in the credits for their games, are Localsoft and Keywords. It should be noted that this sadly remains an issue across the industry, but had been improving slightly as of late.

“I kind of accepted [miscrediting] as ‘part of the business’ but that doesn’t mean it’s fair or right. The fact that these companies are not able to give any reasonable explanation for omitting external translators (and even developers) from their credits is proof of this, I think” they continued.

“Professionally, it’s hard to tell how much this has impacted me. It’s entirely possible that more translation agencies would have approached me if my name was out there in all these big blockbuster Nintendo games, but who knows?”

 “It is Nintendo’s policy to not list the name of translators from external agencies in their game credits, which also forbids us from listing those titles on our CVs,” explained our source.

“If you look at the credits for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, for instance, you will notice that only six people were credited for localizing a full title that’s available in eight languages,” our source continued. “[In my experience] a game like this would normally be localized by a team of around 25 translators. Some languages are skipped over completely like they got magically added to the game.

“For games like Animal Crossing or Breath of the Wild you don’t really notice that 15 or 20 translators are not in the credits, as there are all the other names from their in-house translators, which is why Nintendo’s policy of miscrediting might have flown under the radar. But almost every big title that Nintendo releases which uses external translators actually fails to credit translators.”

They said, when working on Nintendo titles as an external translator, they were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with a standard duration of 10 years, prohibiting them from discussing or promoting their work. Game Developer has viewed an email that confirms Nintendo used a decade-long NDA on multiple projects.

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