That translation offer in your DMs: scam or the real thing?

Your store page goes live and the messages start arriving. Someone loved your game and would like to translate it into their language. Someone else says they represent a publisher who can bring your game to a market you have never sold in. A third offers a complete translation for free, in exchange for a share of revenue and a copy of your project files.

Some of these are exactly what they look like: a working translator with a real portfolio, or a player who genuinely wants the game in their language. Others are a template that went out to two hundred developers this week. A few are straightforward fraud, aimed at the things a small developer has that are easy to take — store keys, builds, project files, and money paid up front.

The difficult part is that the one thing that would settle the question, the quality of their language, is usually the one thing you cannot judge. So this article is about everything else you can judge: how the offer is written, what it asks for, what it asks about, and what a real working relationship looks like from the outside before any translation exists.

Why small developers get targeted

A solo or two-person team is an unusually soft target, and not because anyone is naive. You are publicly visible with a contact address, you have no procurement process and no legal department, and you are receiving the message at a moment when someone praising your game feels wonderful. You also hold assets with immediate resale value: store keys, which can be sold in bulk on grey markets, and a build that can be repackaged and put on other storefronts under someone else's account.

Crucially, you usually cannot evaluate the deliverable. If a contractor sends you bad code, you can read it. If a contractor sends you bad Portuguese, you are looking at text that could be excellent or machine-generated garbage, and it looks identical either way. That asymmetry is what makes translation attractive to people who do not intend to do the work properly.

None of this means a cold message is a bad sign. Freelance translation is a business where cold outreach is completely normal, and some of the best collaborators you will ever have will first appear in your inbox uninvited. The goal is not suspicion — it is a routine that costs you an afternoon and makes the difference visible.

The patterns that repeat

Bad offers are rarely creative. They recycle a small number of shapes, and once you have seen them written down, most of them announce themselves in the first message:

• The mass template — warm praise for your game that contains no detail from your game. If the compliment would work unchanged for any title in your genre, it was not written for you.
• Payment in full before any deliverable, through a method with no recourse — gift cards, crypto, or a direct transfer to a name that does not match the one in the conversation.
• A publisher offer with no findable history: exclusive rights to a region in exchange for handling the translation, no contract, no company that predates the message, no releases you can look up.
• Key farming — a request for a batch of store keys for the translation team, for reviewers, or for testing. A real translator needs one or two keys, and usually asks after the work is agreed, not before.
• Access requests larger than the job: the engine project, the source repository, unreleased builds, or store credentials. Translating text does not require any of these.
• Free now, revenue share later, with the terms staying vague. Every request to define the share concretely gets answered with reassurance rather than numbers.
• Unverifiable credentials — shipped titles that do not credit them anywhere, screenshots of work with no traceable source, a portfolio hosted somewhere that appeared last month.
• Manufactured urgency: a discounted rate that expires, a slot that closes on Friday, a launch window you will miss. Real schedules exist, but a real professional describes them as constraints, not as pressure.

What a genuine offer looks like

The clearest signal is direction: a professional asks you questions before they quote. How many words or characters is the text? What format can you export — CSV, JSON, spreadsheet, engine-specific? Is the text final or still changing? Is there a glossary or a character list? Who reviews the result, and against what? Are there length limits in the UI? Someone who quotes a price and a deadline without knowing any of that either does not intend to do the work or has not understood it.

The second signal is precision about money. A real quote states a unit — per source word, per target word, per source character — and says which, because the difference is significant. It says what is included: translation only, or translation plus a review pass, or a check inside the running game. It has payment terms, an invoice, and a name that stays the same from the first message to the bank details.

The third is what they ask to be given. A translator needs a text export, context (screenshots, a short video, a character list, notes on tone), and eventually a build or a key so they can see their lines in place. They do not need your repository, and a good one will tell you so if you offer.

Offers from enthusiastic players are a genuinely different conversation, not a worse one. A fan who wants your game in their language is usually sincere and usually unpaid, which brings its own set of questions — scope, credit, who owns the resulting text, what happens if they stop halfway. Treat that as a collaboration to define carefully rather than a cheap version of hiring someone.

A verification routine that takes an afternoon

You do not need to become an investigator. You need a fixed sequence you run every time, so that the pleasant messages and the manipulative ones go through the same filter:

• Search their name together with the titles they claim, and check whether those games credit them — in the credits screen, on the store page, or in a public profile that predates your conversation.
• Ask a question only a practitioner can answer well: how they handle a placeholder such as a player name inside a sentence, or what they would do when a translated line does not fit the button. Vagueness here is more informative than any portfolio.
• Ask for two references you can actually contact, and contact one.
• Commission a small paid test — a few hundred words of real text, with real context, at their normal rate. Pay for it. A free test is exactly where a serious professional and a scammer look the same, and paying also filters out anyone who was never planning to deliver.
• Have that test checked by a second speaker of the language, paid separately and briefed not to know who wrote it. This is the only step that actually evaluates quality, and it costs far less than a full project.
• Agree the payment schedule in writing before the real work starts. Splitting into a deposit and a balance on delivery is normal; full payment up front to someone with no history is not.
• Start with a bounded first job — your store page, or one chapter — and expand only after it lands well.

Never hand over, regardless of how the conversation goes:
  - engine project files or your source repository
  - store or platform credentials, signing keys
  - large batches of store keys
  - unreleased builds with no agreement in place
  - payment in full, up front, by an unrecoverable method

What a translator legitimately needs:
  - a text export (CSV / JSON / spreadsheet)
  - a glossary, character list, and tone notes
  - screenshots or a short video for context
  - one or two keys, once the job is agreed

Saying no without burning the bridge

Most of these messages need a short, kind, final answer, and you owe nobody an explanation of your reasoning. Silence is also a legitimate response to an obvious template — you are not being rude to a mail merge. But for anyone who wrote to you personally, a two-line reply keeps a door open that you may want later, when you do have a budget.

Keep the good ones. Start a plain file of everyone who wrote something specific and sensible, with their language pair, their rate if they quoted, and one line about the exchange. When the day comes that you can pay for a translation, that file is worth more than any search you could run at short notice.

Declining, no budget:
Thanks for reaching out, and for playing the game. I'm not in a
position to commission a translation right now. If that changes,
would it be all right if I got back in touch? I've saved your details.

Declining an unsolicited publishing / rights offer:
Thanks for the offer. I'm not looking for a regional publishing
partner at the moment and I'm not able to share builds or keys
outside of that. I'll reach out if my plans change.

Declining but keeping a fan on side:
It means a lot that you'd want to do this. I'm not ready to open
the game up for community translation yet, because I want to get
the process right first. I'll post in the Discord when I do.

If you already handed something over

It happens, and it is worth acting quickly rather than quietly. If you gave out store keys, most platforms let a developer revoke or deactivate unused keys — do it from your developer dashboard rather than negotiating with the recipient. If you shared credentials, change them and turn on two-factor authentication everywhere it is available. If you paid, stop any further payments and, if you used a method with a dispute process, open one immediately rather than after another round of promises.

If a build of your game turns up somewhere you did not publish it, every major storefront has a rights-holder reporting route. Use it, and do not try to resolve it in DMs — you are the rights holder and the platform is the enforcement mechanism, not you.

Then write down what happened while it is fresh: what was asked for, what you sent, what convinced you. Developers who get caught almost never do so because they were careless — it is because the message arrived on a day when someone praising their game was exactly what they needed to hear. A short note to yourself is what turns that into a routine you run next time instead of an embarrassment you avoid thinking about.