Gaming industry website Game developer has produced an investigative report on Nintendo that reveals that outsourced translators who worked on major key Nintendo franchises were denied credit by Nintendo and locked in NDAs for a decade. The site spoke to multiple translators, who wish to remain anonymous, who say the Kyoto-based company has repeatedly failed to recognize franchises ranging from The Legend of Zelda to Animal Crossing for their work, which took months to translate. Nintendo seems to have a problem with crediting outside contractors rather than those working internally at Nintendo. Two translation companies that work on Nintendo projects, but seem to be ignored by Nintendo in the credits for their games, are Localsoft and Keywords. It should be noted that this is unfortunately still a problem throughout the industry, but has been slowly improving lately.
“I kind of accepted it [miscrediting] as “part of the job” but that doesn’t mean it’s fair or right. I think this is evidenced by the fact that these companies are unable to provide any reasonable explanation for leaving outsourcers (and even developers) out of their credits,” they continued.
“Professionally, it’s hard to say how much it affected me. It’s entirely possible that more translation agencies would have approached me if my name was in all those blockbuster Nintendo games, but who knows?”
“Nintendo’s policy is to not list the names of outside agency translators in their credits, which also prohibits us from listing those titles on our resumes,” our source explained.
“If you look at the credits for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, for example, you’ll notice that only six people are credited with localizing the entire title, which is 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 completely skipped as if they were 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 aren’t in the credits, because there are all the other names of their internal translators, so Nintendo’s miscrediting policy might have flown under the radar. But almost every major title that Nintendo puts out that uses outside translators doesn’t actually credit the translator.”
They said that while working on Nintendo titles as an outside translator, they were required to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with a standard term of 10 years, prohibiting them from discussing or promoting their work. A game developer has reviewed an email confirming that Nintendo has used a decade-long NDA on multiple projects.
