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According to recent reports, Nintendo is failing to credit some of its external translators, and they’re being given decade-long NDAs that prevent them from promoting their own work.
Affected workers have apparently been contributing to titles such as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Super Mario RPG, and Nintendo “repeatedly failed to credit them for their work on a litany of critically acclaimed titles,” according to GameDeveloper who originally uncovered the story.
It should be noted that each of the sources who testified has chosen to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution. In recalling an instance in which “the company decided not to put the in-house testers in the credits,” one of the sources said that “translators on that project protested strongly against this decision.” Yet ultimately the protest was futile.
Localsoft is a B2B translation and localisation service responsible for work on several Nintendo projects. Sources claim that they were repeatedly not credited for their work by either Localsoft or Keywords (another Nintendo service provider).
“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.
“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?”
GameDeveloper has said that the above claims have been corroborated by another source, who claims that “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.” The publisher also reports that it has seen NDAs enforcing decade long gags on discussing projects long since released.
The source brings up a few evidential facts. Only six credits for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, which would apparently need a team of 25 translators, for example.
“You work on an award-winning title with newspapers and magazines raving about your work, and you’re forced to hide the fact that you actually were a part of that for 10 years,” the source said.
We have reached out to Nintendo to better understand the situation ourselves.
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