Imagine this: You’re Seif Chaib, a respected game localization expert, doomscrolling through LinkedIn, expecting nothing more than the usual corporate drivel about “leveraging synergies” and “disrupting workflows.” But then—what’s this? An article from Altagram, one of the biggest localization companies in the industry, about Arabic localization. Hmm. Intriguing.
And then it hits you.
Wait a minute—you wrote this article. But not for them. Congratulations, Seif, you’ve just been inducted into the prestigious “Altagram School of Unpaid Contributions,” where the tuition is free, but the cost is your intellectual property. The only graduation ceremony is realizing you’ve been robbed.
Seif’s work was copied, reworded just enough to avoid detection, and republished under Altagram’s name. The best part? They didn’t even do it well. His screenshots, metaphors, and unique phrasing were lifted almost identically, proving that this was no mere coincidence. The cherry on top was that they somehow managed to include a piracy website’s logo in their promotional material, which is the equivalent of robbing a bank, filming the entire thing in 4K, and then sending the footage to the police as a Christmas card.
This isn’t even Altagram’s first rodeo when it comes to failing to credit people. Their Baldur’s Gate 3 controversy had translators fighting for the right to be acknowledged for their own work. Their CEO, Marie Amigues, even admitted in an interview at Gamescom 2023 that Altagram was only able to ensure full crediting on about five percent of their projects. Five percent. That means translators working on their projects have a better chance of being abducted by aliens than getting their name in the game credits.
But how plausible is this excuse? Many of the biggest game studios—Electronic Arts, Microsoft, SEGA, and Nintendo—have no issue crediting their translators. In fact, they often go out of their way to ask how translators want to be credited, even when the translators themselves forget about it. Electronic Arts, in particular, has recently improved its practices, but historically, most large studios (Japanese studios excepted maybe) have been transparent in acknowledging contributors. The real reason many translation agencies refuse to credit translators isn’t because the game studios won’t allow it—it’s because agencies are terrified of their translators getting poached, as if they’re rare Pokémon that must be hidden at all costs. Gotta hoard ’em all.
I’ll be the first to admit—I used to think like that too. For years, I hesitated to credit my own translators for fear of poaching. But then I realized that if I took good care of them, they wouldn’t even want to be poached. Treating translators with respect, fairness, and transparency creates a loyal and motivated team. Instead of hiding them, I started making sure they got the credit they deserved. And guess what? It didn’t hurt my business—it strengthened it.
Now, Altagram has escalated from failing to credit translators to outright lifting entire analytical pieces from independent experts. From “forgetting” to credit contributors to “forgetting” that they didn’t write the article they published, Altagram is setting new standards in corporate absurdity.
Seif suspects that his work was fed into an AI model, slightly altered, and then regurgitated for SEO purposes. It makes sense. AI can paraphrase, but it can’t disguise the fact that the structure, case studies, and conclusions were exactly the same. The problem isn’t just AI—it’s companies using AI to steal and repackage work without doing the bare minimum of human oversight.
If Altagram was going to steal, they could have at least done it well. Instead, they kept Seif’s original structure, the same arguments, and even the exact same screenshots. It’s the localization equivalent of copying your friend’s homework but forgetting to change the name at the top. They weren’t even strategic about it. It’s as if they ran a find-and-replace function, swapped out a few words, and hoped nobody would notice. If sloppiness was an Olympic event, Altagram would take home the gold, silver, and bronze.
The best part of all this? Altagram won’t fix it. But they did have time for some damage control acrobatics. Instead of doing the ethical thing—like issuing an apology or taking the article down entirely—they opted for the classic ‘scrub and deny’ approach:
- They deleted the most obviously plagiarized sections and images but left the reworded bulk of the article standing.
- They cropped out the piracy website logo they had previously credited with a direct link (because nothing screams ‘we totally know what we’re doing’ like accidentally promoting game piracy to developers).
- And in a move that deserves an award for peak corporate gaslighting, they added a vague ‘correction’ that admits they took content from existing discussions without actually crediting the source or taking responsibility.
Their excuse? ‘Our article previously referenced two examples from existing discussions on Arabic localization. We’ve updated the content to remove those references and ensure it reflects our own analysis.’
Ah yes, ‘referencing discussions’—also known as copy-pasting someone else’s work and pretending you thought of it first.
And, of course, they never reached out to Seif. Never apologized. Never acknowledged what they actually did. Just a quick little scrub-and-tweak job, hoping nobody would notice. But the internet never forgets.
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