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I'm not an expert on the industry, so I don't know at what point in production games are usually localised nowadays, but I've had this hypothesis ever since I watched Thomas Game Docs' video about Pokémon games in Spanish. The cliff-notes version is that during the 7th generation, most Nintendo-published games got separate American and European Spanish translations, except for Pokémon. Additionally, I've noticed that Nintendo started translating games into Russian and Dutch after the release of the Wii U, but you can't get Pokémon games in those either.
However, if this Did You Know Gaming video is anything to go by, this wasn't always the case. Red and Blue were translated into French by an established member of Nintendo of Europe (he voiced Luigi in Mario Kart 64), and into Italian by two people who were given lists of words out-of-context and told to translate them. (Also, they were told they'd be translating it from German, which was already translated from the English script. This is Inception-levels of recursion.)
However, if this Did You Know Gaming video is anything to go by, this wasn't always the case. Red and Blue were translated into French by an established member of Nintendo of Europe (he voiced Luigi in Mario Kart 64), and into Italian by two people who were given lists of words out-of-context and told to translate them. (Also, they were told they'd be translating it from German, which was already translated from the English script. This is Inception-levels of recursion.)