The gaming industry is full of controversies, especially in recent times. Nintendo is a company to whom very few controversies are attached, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have any. Sometimes, they make controversial gaming decisions with key franchises or won’t do right by gamers via its online components, how they handle things like tournaments or music, and so on. Fast forward to now, and a new complaint has been filed against The Big N. Specifically, a group of people are stepping forward and revealing that the company isn’t giving proper credit to translators who work on games for them.
Multiple translators, who have remained anonymous in the report for protection, talked with Game Developer, and they cited that Nintendo only gives credit to the translators that are within the company itself, not the ones that are hired on a freelance basis. As such, they can’t take credit for the work they put in:
“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,” one translator noted.
That’s bad because you need those kinds of references for new jobs, and if you can’t prove you worked for The Big N, it will look odd that you put it on your resume.
Some of the people in the report gave specifics on games that The Big N shafted freelance translators on, and one of the titles named might surprise you:
“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. 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.”
These translators also signed NDAs that sometimes last up to ten years! Thus, they can’t even try to fight this in the typical way, which is another reason they had to do this anonymously. This group also cites that those who work with Nintendo on this, like the group Localsoft, don’t reveal to hired translators that these are the conditions they’re signing up for.
Sadly, this isn’t the first time The Big N has had this kind of issue, nor is it a practice that has been attached solely to them. However, if someone puts a good amount of work into the game, they need to be credited; that’s called “being fair.”
