In order to bring Japanese games like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to America and other countries around the world, Nintendo uses teams of internal and external translators to fully localize each title. But you’d never know that from the games’ credits, which exclude the names of the external translators. Now, a small number of external translators are speaking out about not being credited for their contributions to some of Nintendo’s biggest titles.
Via GameDeveloper.com, an anonymous former Nintendo employee–who currently works as a translator for Nintendo through an outside company called Localsoft–has detailed the onerous terms that the external translators have had to deal with. In addition to not getting any credit in the games themselves, the translators have to sign a 10-year NDA that prevents them from telling anyone they worked on the titles or even putting them on their resumes.
“I felt I would benefit from being able to state I worked on the title when offering my services to new clients. Not to mention that I actually spent a fair amount of time working almost exclusively for them,” wrote an anonymous translator. “It is nigh impossible for translators to push back against this structure. Anyone trying will get blacklisted before getting anywhere. This is a field where taking an annual break can shut you out of months of work. No one cares what we think because there’s literally nothing we can do about it, and that’s even if we were willing to forfeit our livelihood for the greater good.”
Nintendo’s exclusion of the external translators from their rightful credit appears to be the company’s stance on the issue. As noted above, the vast majority of the translators are unwilling to risk their livelihoods by calling out Nintendo’s practices. But the only way this issue can be addressed is if the public pressure is great enough to convince Nintendo to change that policy. Otherwise the status quo will remain.
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