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The panel catalog behind the menu bar translated the dialogs and Preferences, but much of the work area was still English: panel tabs, form fields, panel context menus, the tracker and graph controls, text-panel options, the File panel's footers and the credits. Add 300 rows to the Japanese catalog — and the matching Simplified and Traditional Chinese sources the tests keep it in step with (the other languages may lag, an untranslated row falls back to English): - panel tabs (dock.rs / dock_ui.rs titles), the Project panel's columns, footer tooltips and column menu; - form and dialog labels and choice options (the forms the panels open — import, interpret footage, render queue, trackers, text animators…); - panel context menus (timeline layer/property menus, graph editor); - the tracker, graph editor, text-panel, animator and Content-Aware Fill labels; - the Preview panel's transport tooltips, credits table headers and sort options, the composition-settings tabs and the About links; - the engine's text-animator menu labels, added as a data source like the settings pages (they are interface text the panels draw). Strings are wrapped where they are drawn with the existing `tr`/`tr_args` mechanism (the label helpers already ask the catalog, so the data tables need no new ids); the catalog tests keep the three complete languages listing the same sources, reject duplicate or empty rows and keep the placeholder counts. A new test assertion in `japanese_rows_translate_the_panels` pins a sample of this step. The panel catalogs are now 993 Japanese and 995 Chinese rows (the two Chinese catalogs are the complete source list); with the 628-row menu catalogs Japanese is 1,621 of ≈ 4,200 interface strings (39%, up from 27%). Still English: effect parameter names (≈ 1,650 registry names, drawn from the model, not the catalogs), Home-screen literals, tooltips drawn from engine data, engine error messages, and the rows other languages lack. Docs: localization-parity (header, per-language table, overall share, revision history), ROADMAP (language table, progress log, revision history).
10 KiB
Localization parity
Last reviewed: 2026-10-12 · Last updated: 2026-10-22 · Change: minor (the panel/dialog catalogs grow by 300 rows in Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese: panel tabs, form and dialog labels, context menus, tracker/graph/text-panel labels, credits and File-panel footers; Japanese 1,621 and Chinese 1,623 of ≈ 4,200 interface strings; previously: minor, catalogs recounted at
upstream/main470ea7a3: menus in 10 languages, panels in 6, Hangul probe (#599)) · Target: Adobe After Effects 2026
How much of EffectCraft's interface is translated, language by language, compared with After Effects. gaps.md gap 16 and workstream G9 hold the work; target-app-parity.md the overall numbers.
What After Effects ships
The installed After Effects 2026 (26.5.0.89) bundle has 11 .lproj localisations: English,
French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Simplified
Chinese (zh_CN) and Traditional Chinese (zh_TW). Each translates the whole interface,
including effect names and parameters. It ships no Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian or Vietnamese
interface; Arabic and Hebrew text in layers is supported through its Middle Eastern text engine.
How EffectCraft translates
- Menus:
crates/ui-egui/src/i18n.rs, one catalog per language keyed by(command, English label). A test (every_translation_key_exists_in_the_actual_menu_tree) fails if any fixed menu entry is untranslated or a row is stale, so every catalog covers all fixed entries (624 catalog rows each at470ea7a3, counted). The generated Effect menu is not part of that fixed tree: its entries and category submenus take their labels from the effect catalog below. - Panels, dialogs, buttons, tooltips:
crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/ui.rs, keyed by the English source string, with English fallback. Catalogs exist for Japanese (410 rows), Simplified and Traditional Chinese (506 each), Ukrainian (505), Brazilian Portuguese (400) and Czech (501); counted at470ea7a3. - Effect names:
crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/effects.rs, keyed by effect id, in Simplified Chinese (306 rows, one per effect in the registry, plus its 21 categories). The registry's English name stays the effect's identity:effect.list,effect.apply {"effect": …}, scripts and expressions match on it, and the property tree stores it as the effect group's name. Only the drawing — the Effect menu, Effect Controls, the Timeline and Effects & Presets — goes through the catalog, so a project file is identical whichever interface language opens it. A repeat (Gaussian Blur 2) keeps the index the engine appends, and a group the user renamed in Effect Controls stays verbatim. Adding a language there is two tables and one arm, and no panel changes: Traditional Chinese and Japanese have their tables in place and empty, so those languages draw English until a translator fills them (the Japanese set for #821 is what that slot is for). Each language decides for itself which names stay English — Adobe's Japanese interface leaves theCC,VRandOCIOsets in English while its Chinese one translates them — so a row repeating the English name is a choice, not a missing row. - Not translated anywhere yet: effect parameter names (≈ 1,650,
crates/effects), engine-generated text (property names, errors, undo labels), the Home screen's unwrapped literals (#574), Learn tutorials and documentation. - Language choice: Settings ▸ General ▸ Language, or Match System
(
match_system_uses_the_system_language_where_there_is_a_catalog). - Fonts: no bundled CJK font; the UI installs system fallbacks probed by script (Kana, Han,
Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam,
Thai and Hangul:
crates/ui-egui/src/theme.rs; the Hangul probe was added for #599, closed). The web build has no system fonts. - Script support in the interface: egui draws text without complex shaping or right-to-left
layout, so an Arabic or Hindi interface would render unshaped and left to right. In text
layers (
crates/text) shaping (harfrust), bidi (UAX #9), vertical text and Tate-Chu-Yoko work; text-layer typing goes through the IME (viewer_text.rshandles preedit and commit).
Measurement
Measured 10 October 2026 at origin/main 1446e27 and recounted on 12 October at upstream/main
470ea7a3 by counting catalog rows (const tables in crates/ui-egui/src/i18n.rs and
i18n/ui.rs; menu rows 624 per language, so the share is computed from 624 rather than 618). The
denominator, ≈ 3,900 user-visible strings, was estimated on 10 October and is kept: 618 fixed menu entries + ≈ 1,320 capitalised UI
literals in crates/ui-egui/src outside tests and catalogs (a regex count, so an upper bound) +
≈ 1,650 distinct effect parameter names + 306 effect names. Engine messages are not counted, so
the true percentages are slightly lower.
| Language | Code | UI strings translated | Dialogs / tooltips / help | Script support | Native review | Status | To full |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | en |
≈ 4,200 (100%, source) | All; docs in English | — | yes | full | — |
| Simplified Chinese | zh-hans |
1,623 (≈ 39%): menus 628 rows, panels 995 | Panels and dialogs partly; no help, effect names translated (306) and their parameter names not; Home screen literals unwrapped (#574, closed) | System CJK fallback; Han follows the UI language; CJK text in comps renders wrongly (#453); IME in text layers | no | partial | 6–9 h + review |
| Spanish | es |
628 (≈ 15%) | Menus only (panel catalog in open PR #996) | Latin, fine | no | menus only | 7–10 h + review |
| Hindi | hi |
0 | — | UI: Devanagari fallback font but no shaping; text layers shape Devanagari | no | none (After Effects: none) | 9–13 h + shaping in the UI |
| Arabic | ar |
0 | — | UI: Arabic fallback font but no shaping and no RTL layout; text layers: bidi + shaping | no | none (After Effects: none) | 9–13 h + 15–25 h RTL UI |
| French | fr |
628 (≈ 15%) | Menus only | Latin, fine | no | menus only | 7–10 h + review |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | pt-br |
1,045 (≈ 25%): menus 628 rows, panels 417 | Panels and dialogs partly | Latin, fine | no | partial | 6–9 h + review |
| Indonesian | id |
0 | — | Latin, fine | no | none (After Effects: none) | 8–12 h + review |
| Japanese | ja |
1,621 (≈ 39%): menus 628 rows, panels 993 | Panels and dialogs partly | Japanese system fallback; vertical text and Tate-Chu-Yoko in text layers; IME | no | partial | 6–9 h + review |
| German | de |
628 (≈ 15%) | Menus only (open PR #666 adds interface translations) | Latin, fine | no | menus only | 7–10 h + review |
| Korean | ko |
0 | — | Hangul fallback probe added (#599, closed); not checked on macOS here | no | none | 9–13 h + review |
| Vietnamese | vi |
0 | — | Latin with stacked diacritics; untested | no | none (After Effects: none) | 8–12 h + review |
Other languages EffectCraft ships (3):
| Language | Code | UI strings translated | Status | To full |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | zh-hant |
1,623 (≈ 39%): menus 628 rows, panels 995 | partial | 6–9 h + review |
| Ukrainian | uk |
1,152 (≈ 27%): menus 628 rows, panels 524 | partial | 6–9 h + review |
| Czech | cs |
1,146 (≈ 27%): menus 628 rows, panels 518 | Existing catalog entries covered; unwrapped UI, effects and engine text still in English; AI-assisted, not yet native-speaker proofread | Remaining strings + independent native review |
Russian (ru) has a menu catalog (628 rows, ≈ 15%); After Effects also ships Italian, which EffectCraft does not (8–12 h).
Overall: ≈ 27%, the average coverage of After Effects' 10 non-English languages (Simplified and Traditional Chinese 39%, Japanese 39%, Ukrainian 27%, Czech 27%, Brazilian Portuguese 25%, Spanish, French and German 15%, German and Russian 16%, Korean and Italian 0%; 175 / 10, was ≈ 12% on 10 October). This is the localization row in target-app-parity.md.
Effort. One-time work first: route parameter names and engine messages through a catalog, wrap the remaining panel literals, and add a Hangul probe (10–20 h). Then each language needs ≈ 2,900 more strings (≈ 5–9 h per language at the pace of #398 and #401). Parity with After Effects' 10 non-English languages: ≈ 60–110 h; the four extra languages of the standard list (Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Vietnamese) add ≈ 50–80 h, most of it right-to-left layout and complex shaping in the interface. Every language needs native-speaker review, which only a human can give; none has had it.
Revision history
| Date | Change | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | minor | Panel/dialog second step: 300 more catalog rows in Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese (and no changes to the other catalogs) — panel tabs, form and dialog labels, panel context menus, the tracker and graph controls, text-panel options, File-panel footers and credits; the panel tables are now 993 Japanese and 995 Chinese rows, all drawn through tr/tr_args, with the tests keeping the three catalogs listing the same sources |
| 2026-10-12 | minor | Recounted: Russian, French, German and Czech menus (#873, #987), Brazilian Portuguese and Czech panels (#830, #987), Hangul probe (#599); overall ≈ 12% to ≈ 18%; Korean and Italian still absent |
| 2026-10-10 | major | First localization parity document: catalog rows counted for all six languages, the twelve-language table, After Effects' 11 shipped languages from its bundle |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Ukrainian panel catalog brought level with the Chinese ones (495 of 496 rows, counted at this commit); its share rises to ≈ 29%. The other languages' panel counts are the 10 October measurement |
| 2026-10-13 | minor | Effect names and the generated Effect menu leave English: i18n/effects.rs adds 306 rows keyed by effect id (Simplified Chinese, from After Effects 2026's interface and Adobe's Chinese documentation for the CC series) and the 21 category names. Parameter names are still English; no other language has rows |