External translators hired by Nintendo have begun coming out to bemoan the treatment the Japanese gaming giant gave. For the most part, it’s about required NDAs that restrict workers from discussing their involvement for 10 years and miscrediting those who worked on it.
In a bombshell report from Game Developer, anonymous sources say they felt “robbed” because of the policies the company has with external translators. Many first-party Nintendo games work with third-party translators to bring its game to a different audience and make sure said game won’t clash with different cultures upon release. This is a fairly standard thing.
Games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario RPG, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons all used external translators to bring the game outside of Japan. One source who was once employed at Nintendo directly was always credited, but since becoming a freelance translator, even though they continued to work on Nintendo games, they’ve yet to be credited for their work. In this instance, it didn’t bother the individual that much, believing it to be “part of the industry.”
“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?”
Another source beefed up the note, stating it’s Nintendo’s policy to not list external help in its games, which means even if a person worked as a translator for a high-profile game — let’s say Tears of the Kingdom — they couldn’t put it in their CVs.
“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.”
Meanwhile, Game Developer confirms through shared emails with a source of multiple Nintendo projects fostering a decade-long NDA, barring anyone from being able to discuss or state they worked on a Nintendo game, which would no doubt bolster their translator career.
The overarching nature of this story, though, was more of a broad realization that translators often get left by the wayside, whether that’s due to a laundry list of languages or because it has some sort of policy that harms the translators in this way. Frankly, it is on brand for Nintendo to foster such a lackluster feeling toward its external translators.
