Brandon ThomasandClaude Opus 5.5
1e61b4e04b
Progress docs per craftrules standards/progress-docs.md: target-app parity, gaps, roadmap with alpha gate, readiness by audience (full / mainstream / essentials) with Opus 5.5 hours, and feature, format, hardware, UI and localization parity docs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
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Localization parity
Last reviewed: 2026-10-10 · Last updated: 2026-10-10 · Change: major (first measurement of every catalog against the After Effects 2026 26.5 language set) · 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 618 fixed entries. The generated Effect menu (effect names) is deliberately left in English. - Panels, dialogs, buttons, tooltips:
crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/ui.rs, keyed by the English source string, with English fallback. Catalogs exist for Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese and Ukrainian. - Not translated anywhere yet: effect names and their ≈ 1,650 parameter names
(
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:
crates/ui-egui/src/theme.rs). There is no Hangul probe, so Korean renders as boxes on macOS (#599). 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 by counting catalog rows. The denominator,
≈ 3,900 user-visible strings, is estimated: 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 |
≈ 3,900 (100%, source) | All; docs in English | — | yes | full | — |
| Simplified Chinese | zh-hans |
1,081 (≈ 28%): menus 618/618, panels 463 | Panels and dialogs partly (≈ 35% of panel strings); no help, effects untranslated; Home screen literals unwrapped (#574) | 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 |
618 (≈ 16%) | Menus only | 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 |
0 | — | Latin, fine | no | none | 8–12 h + review |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | pt-br |
618 (≈ 16%) | Menus only | Latin, fine | no | menus only | 7–10 h + review |
| Indonesian | id |
0 | — | Latin, fine | no | none (After Effects: none) | 8–12 h + review |
| Japanese | ja |
1,015 (≈ 26%): menus 618/618, panels 397 | Panels and dialogs partly (≈ 30% of panel strings) | Japanese system fallback; vertical text and Tate-Chu-Yoko in text layers; IME | no | partial | 6–9 h + review |
| German | de |
0 | — | Latin, fine | no | none | 8–12 h + review |
| Korean | ko |
0 | — | No Hangul fallback probe: boxes on macOS (#599) | 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 (2):
| Language | Code | UI strings translated | Status | To full |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | zh-hant |
1,081 (≈ 28%): menus 618/618, panels 463 | partial | 6–9 h + review |
| Ukrainian | uk |
1,015 (≈ 26%): menus 618/618, panels 397 | partial | 6–9 h + review |
After Effects also ships Italian and Russian, which EffectCraft does not (8–12 h each).
Overall: ≈ 12%, the average coverage of After Effects' 10 non-English languages (Simplified and Traditional Chinese 28%, Japanese 26%, Spanish and Portuguese 16%, French, German, Korean, Italian and Russian 0%). This is the localization row in target-app-parity.md.
Effort. One-time work first: route effect names, 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-10 | major | First localization parity document: catalog rows counted for all six languages, the twelve-language table, After Effects' 11 shipped languages from its bundle |