#TranslatorsInTheCredits - Why It Matters
It’s 2025. Between AI, greedy agencies and crediting omissions, video game translators have to fight just to keep working in this industry.
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You are a game translator. You scroll online and see others sharing their names with pride—as they should. They do a job to be proud of, despite all the overworked weeks and impossible deadlines. To make gamers laugh, cry or simply allow them to play in their native language is an amazing feeling.
You read the texts to be translated. Hundreds of words in small boxes often disconnected from one another. You spend hours making them make sense, understanding their context, getting their subtext, finding ways to make the humor accessible in your target culture, digging into the story in order to know what the characters are feeling and along the way asking a million questions to the devs to make sure you got everything right.
Then you start translating. You give your everything: you find the appropriate voices, you make them sound natural, you regularly check on whether questions have been answered, and you adjust your translation as necessary. You chat with your reviewer, if you’re lucky enough to have access to them, and you chat with the other language teams, if you’re extra lucky to be able to reach them too. You try to produce the best translation possible with what you have—and what you have sometimes is not enough—but you do it nonetheless.
Then you proofread, and suddenly have new ideas to improve some sentences or to use or twist a typical locution to make a joke surprising and memorable to your players.
Then you play the game to find and remove the last micro mistakes you could have missed in those previous sleepless days.
You’re overworked and had to handle impossible deadlines, but you did it: your localization is complete.
You’re going to make gamers laugh, cry, have fun their native language. It is an amazing feeling that makes it all worth it. You’re proud. Those characters, this world… It’s all a part of you now.
Then you realize your name isn’t in the credits.
So you ask for it and the excuses come out:
”You joined later on.”
”The client didn’t ask for the names.”
”This developer never credits.”
”There’s no space in the credits for translators (but there is for in-house managers).”
“It is what it is”, you tell yourself. “That’s how the industry works.”
In these past couple of years, we’ve seen news raising issues with crediting. To understand the problem, we must go to its source: agencies, or Language Service Providers (LSPs), and their Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs).
When I started my career, I was afraid. Afraid of saying something publicly that I shouldn’t. Afraid of setting boundaries with agencies. Afraid that what I signed would prevent me from telling the world about the games I worked on—for life and throughout the multiverse .
I didn’t understand why audiovisual translators and literary translators had their names on everything, but video game translators couldn’t say anything at all. I didn’t question it either, too scared of my NDAs and the possibility of being blackballed from what I feel lucky to call my job: translating video games.
It’s 2025. According to ATRAE, only 3 out of 5 games nominated at the latest Game Awards credit their Spanish collaborators.
This has been going on for years, long before the hashtag #TranslatorsInTheCredits started with support from accounts like Gameloc Gathering, Loc in Credits and various personal accounts posting credits to highlight omissions. Each year, I see the hashtag used more and more for pride, showing people credited rather than to call out and shame omissions. This is wonderful. That means people spoke up, developers cared and agencies complied.
But (there’s always a but) we still see some LSPs straight out refusing to credit their freelance collaborators, although the list they send never fails to credit the CEO, CCO, and the likes. This is a power move. And in current times, it’s a tool to erase our precious job in order to make it easier to implement AI and other cost-cutting measures.
If we’re not credited, we’re not valued, and if our job is not valued, it’s easier to replace.
Most people will argue the reason for not crediting freelancers is poaching, (when another agency or a developer approaches you to translate their game because they saw you in the credits of one). I will say that I believed this for a short period of time; but developers and publishers tend to default to the big players in the industry who have solidified a very good reputation by claiming to be the best when, in fact, their freelancers are the best despite the decaying rates they offer, the short deadlines they impose or the lack of crediting.
These freelancers are professionals, and their work should speak for itself.
These big players won’t poach you, they won’t offer you more than others, because their margin for your language pair is what it is. In fact, these big players will offer you less each year that passes, making it impossible for you to face all the expenses of freelance life. To them, you are just a number, a resource, and the power they hold over you is knowing that if you speak up, they’ll easily find a different translator to replace you.
Then you start joining discord forums, associations and the likes. You find you’re not alone. You’ve all been told the same excuses and you’ve all suffered the same outcome: no credits, no possible mention whatsoever of the games and a possible retaliation if they even find out you went against what they’ve told you. You decide you’ll fight to change it.
It’s 2025. Find your voice. You’re worth it.
As a freelancer, crediting is a tool: the only one we have as workers. It’s our cover letter, our portfolio, our value, and something that speaks for itself on how we work. The text we put out is our everything. LSPs know it, and they deliberately obscure our presence.
Them failing to credit you—“mishaps”, as they’ll sometimes say—hinders your opportunities to grow while they profit from your work (they’re the ones credited, after all), but that doesn’t mean more projects for you, as you’ll eventually be replaced with a translator who accepted a lower rate, probably because they’re not aware of the market and LSPs keep offering lower rates to newcomers or pushing their loyal translators to accept less if they want to keep working with them.
It’s 2025. We keep fighting.
If you’re a developer reading this piece: please have your team or your publishers draft up a clause that forces LSPs to give you the names of the people who skillfully brought your game to the rest of the world. Help us overcome that obstacle.
If you’re a fellow translator: you’re not alone. Know your rights and fight for them. Ask about credits, use the clause that says you can ask on a game-to-game basis if you can disclose your involvement. Speak up or speak with people more active on the subject and join them in denouncing the situation.
If you’re working in Spain, the law is on your side. We’ve all got your back.
It’s 2025. Everyone deserves to be credited for their work, no matter the size of their contribution.