Summary

Nintendohas been accused of failing to credit translators for multiple games, and even making them sign NDAs that prevent them from sharing their work. The most recent alleged example of this is thePaper Mario: The Thousand-Year Doorremake, with translators saying they are now subject to ten-year-long NDAs.

This is according to a report fromGame Developer, which quotes numerous anonymous Nintendo translators. They say that Nintendo only credits its in-house translators, but not the freelancers. They add that their NDAs also prevent them from talking about their work, even after the game launches.

Link standing at a cliff in The Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild.

Nintendo Game Translators Say They Cannot Publicly Discuss Their Work

“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,” says one of the sources, who has worked with Nintendo through the company Localsoft.

“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,” they continue. “A game like this would normally be localised by a team of around 25 translators. Some languages are skipped over completely like they got magically added to the game.”

nintendo-company

They add that “almost every big title that Nintendo releases” faces this issue, with the company failing to credit its translators for years. Another source from Localsoft says that they were not warned that this would be the case during development, but it has come to be something that the team expects.

Sources feel that it is “impossible” to combat this because their own employers, like Localsoft, are uninterested in raising this with partners like Nintendo.

Unfortunately, Nintendo is not the only studio that has failed to credit translators in the gaming industry.Baldur’s Gate 3 launched without crediting its translators, but this was later amended in an update. We also saw thiswith Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Goldenearly last year.