Nintendo Portugal talks about translation requests and mentions Brazil

Just like the Brazilians, who recently made a big campaign for Pokémon Scarlet e Pokémon Violet were located for PT-BR, the Portuguese are also committed to having Nintendo titles localized to PT-PT. Jorge Vieira, leader of Nintendo Portugal, spoke about the matter in an interview with Eurogamer this Friday (11).

He mentioned that the resumption of the Japanese company’s business in Brazil, which had official representation in 2020, has helped in this work of convincing the giant to translate the games. Vieira cited the Mario Party Superstars as an example that it is possible to act in this direction.

“It also helps a lot in the Brazilian market that Nintendo is gradually recovering a space it already had in the past and obviously it’s starting to be a bet”, he argued.

In addition to Superstarswhich was the first game to have PT-BR text on Switch, recently the brand revealed that Mario Strikers: Battle League e Nintendo Switch Sports will also have these subtitle options in our language.

Despite this, the executive explained that bringing the representation of a title to a language is not a decision taken quickly and that it depends on a time. According to the Nintendo representative, localization is a complex process that needs to meet a certain quality standard not only in translation, but also in proofreading, for example.

“Localization is an issue that does not only go through each country. Obviously, if the decision were up to us in Portugal, we would have the games localized, but it is a process that certainly has a lot of people involved in the decision. Sometimes I read, with some naivety, which is to take three or four people, we translate and this is fine”.

Promise

Vieira commented that he reads the forums a lot on the internet and always comes across people asking for a stronger Nintendo work in relation to the Portuguese language. He said that he understands the fans’ passion and assured that he is always talking to the “bosses” there in Japan so that the issue is taken into consideration by them.

“The more options we have, the better. If we have the option to have the game in Portuguese, even Brazilian Portuguese […], is a huge help especially with children. But we also have questions of our own, I already had to explain internally about the orthographic agreement, the differences in Portuguese [de Portugal] into Brazilian Portuguese and it is obviously a topic”, he pointed out.

The leader of Nintendo Portugal also promised, at least for the Portuguese, that he will continue to lobby for the Japanese giant to see Portuguese as a strategic language for games.

“We promise that the issue is not forgotten, we continue to work on it and we will see. Our goal is to have more and more localized games in the future”, concluded Vieira.

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