A new report claims that Nintendo doesn’t allow external contractors—who help translate some of their biggest games—to be named and listed in a game’s credits. The company behind Super Mario even, reportedly, forces these translators to sometimes sign 10-year NDAs, making it nearly impossible for them to talk about their work or put it on their CV or resume.
In a new July 12 report from Gamedeveloper.com, multiple sources who have helped localize big Nintendo games claim that they and their colleagues weren’t named in the credits for titles like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. These uncredited translators work for months on Nintendo games. However, according to one source, Nintendo’s policy is to not individually credit these workers. Instead, only in-house, Nintendo-employed translators make the cut.
“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,” one source told the outlet. “[In my experience] 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.”
Worse, according to some external translators, Nintendo made them sign 10-year NDAs, prohibiting them from talking about or promoting their contributions to the game. GameDeveloper.com was able to independently verify these NDAs are real and have been used on multiple Nintendo projects.
“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,” said one translator.
Nintendo didn’t reply to Kotaku or GameDeveloper.com.
Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Video game companies have routinely failed to include everyone who worked on a project in the game’s credits. And when it comes to third-party contractors and external teams, the workers are often stuck between big companies that point the finger at one another but don’t do anything to actually help the people translating some of the biggest games released.
“It is nigh impossible for translators to push back against this structure,” explained one source. “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.”
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