Report: Nintendo miscredited translators on the Switch’s biggest games

And by miscredit, we mean giving absolutely no credit

Nintendo

Nintendo’s policy of withholding information about who’s working on Switch games reportedly goes further than keeping names quiet until launch. Several translators who worked with Nintendo via an external agency spoke with Game Developer and said they failed to receive any credit at all, despite working on some of the Switch’s most successful games, including Tears of the Kingdom, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and 2023’s Super Mario RPG remake.

It’s not the first time Nintendo’s relationship with external workers has come into question. In 2023, a Kotaku report cast light on the House of Mario’s harmful practices against contractors and external hires.

One anonymous source who spoke with GameDeveloper said they started working in-house with Nintendo and received credit as a Nintendo employee, though in some cases, even Nintendo employees were withheld from credit lists. 

"I do remember one project where the company decided not to put the in-house testers in the credits,” they said. “This was one of the Professor Layton games by Level-5. Nintendo of Europe handled the localization and publishing for the Layton series at the time. The translators on that project protested strongly against this decision, but in the end the testers were not credited for this project. I don’t know if this has since become policy."

Another source said Nintendo has a firm policy of not crediting any external contractors. 

"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 said. "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.”

"For games like Animal Crossing or Breath of the Wild, you don't really notice that 15 or 20 translators are not in the credits, as there are all the other names from their in-house translators, which is why Nintendo's policy of miscrediting might have flown under the radar. But almost every big title that Nintendo releases which uses external translators actually fails to credit translators."

They also said Nintendo requires all external localization professionals to sign NDAs covering their work that last up to 10 years. That means they can’t list their contributions on resumes or, when applying for other roles, can’t explain that what looks like gaps in job history aren’t gaps. They’re just uncredited years spend working on some of the industry’s best-selling games.

Companies refusing to credit localization professionals for their work isn’t a new occurrence, though it often flies under the mainstream radar. Manga publishers and even anime giant Crunchyroll have come under fire for leaving translators and editors out of a volume or show’s final credits, but if those affected are working through agencies, they have little recourse to stand up for themselves.

"The closed circuit between game companies and translation agencies is as opaque as it can be so that the agencies can make as much profit as they can,” one of Game Developer’s sources said. “If the game company makes a bad call, the agency will roll with it 100 percent. If the game company screws the translators over, the agency will nod their heads and feed on what's left. And if the agencies can get you to work more for less, even though the company didn't ask for it, they will. It is nigh impossible for translators to push back against this structure. Anyone trying will get blacklisted before getting anywhere.”

They continued: "Perhaps the bigger question is why are externalized translators so often left out? Why would companies be inclined to refuse to credit them in the first place? Who benefits from this obfuscation? And why is it so common practice to strip all of these people of any recognition for their work?"